Ferenc Vörös: Paradigm Shift in Spatial Information Sciences and Name Geography

The name geography offers help for researchers in finding answers for questions which could not be explained so far. Data projected to maps, covering a much larger speech area than before, the whole one or a significant part of it, can be of interest not only for the linguists but for other scientists of neighboring fields as well. In this research on name geography I focused on family name corpuses of two time segments. The data of the first come from the national census of 1720 executed on the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary, and the second from the 2009 population register of the Central Office for Administrative and Electronic Public Services of Hungary. The possibility to compare two distant time segments, between which almost three hundred years elapsed, made my work much easier: the two family name corpuses had the advantage of making possible to examine a large amount of localizable data from the whole Hungarian-speaking area in a given time segment. In the study, four specific family names were examined: Pap, Kovács, Árgyelán and Nagy – as well as spatial (name geographical) divisions of all lexical types of these.