Hegy- és településnevek a Felső-Tisza-vidéken [Names for mountains and settlements in the Upper Tisza region]

Research into the mountain names of historical Hungary has been a neglected area of Hungarian Onomastics to date. However, mountains as important objects of the natural environment have significantly influenced the development of both settlement structure and settlement names for centuries. The results of the author’s research into the names for mountains and those for settlements in the area of four former, northeast counties (Bereg, Máramaros, Ugocsa and Ung) suggest that several minor settlements were named by way of borrowing mountain names – especially in Máramaros County. These peripheral populated places were usually established on mountainsides, thus easily adopted the names of the mountains themselves. Different types of mountain names were involved in the process. Most settlement names were formed from mountain names that were derived from suffixless geographical common nouns through a semantic split. Two-constituent mountain names, however, rarely served as bases for settlement names. Only few Hungarian names can be found among the mountain names of the observed region, as in the Middle Ages the highlands in question were inhabited by Ruthenians and Romanians, while Hungarians mostly settled flat areas. As a result, settlement names formed from mountain names of Hungarian origin were also rare in the four counties mentioned above