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Czech names project update: data entry, part 1

 Figured I might as well actually keep notes on what progress I'm making on this project! As a recap, I'm working on pulling the names out of various data sources for 14th-16th century Czechia, categorizing them by year and by gender, and looking for patterns both in the formation of the bynames and in the construction of the names as a whole.

The first source I'm working with is Marta Štefková's Antroponyma v urbářích z 15.–17. století (Proper Names in Urbars of the 15th–17th centuries, https://is.muni.cz/th/u1ye5/). This paper includes an index of names, with the full list of names from each year of her data (1483, 1581, and 1695); focusing on SCA period means I don't care about the names from 1695 and would prefer to exclude them from my own data. Since I want to do my own analysis of these names, and this sort of data works best in spreadsheets, I started by copying Štefková's list of names from 1483 and 1581 into my own spreadsheet.

Each year in Štefková's index is also broken down by the categories she sees them as falling into, her descriptions of which I've summarized as follows:

1 Single occupational descriptor without other personal name
2 Single personal name (given or byname) without other differentiation - even in the same town
3 Given + occupation
3.1 Given + locative (uncommon in these sources because they're already sorted by location)
3.2 Given + occupation + locative
3.3 Given + relational byname - including relatively unmarked ones, and more distant than immediate family
3.4 Given + descriptive (age)
3.5 Given + relational + descriptive
4 Given + surname (type/origin unclear; may even be inherited)
4.1 Given + ?genitive surname? possible relational byname?
4.2 Given + surname + occupation
4.3 Given + surname + locative
4.4 Given + surname + occupation + locative
4.5 Given + surname + descriptive (age)
5 Given + surname + surname - first byname potentially inherited, second potentially from a nickname

I may or may not decide to keep these categories, as I get more data, but it's as good a start as any. Some numbers for how many names are in each category by year:

Category14831581
1430
256811
34240
3.122
3.215
3.3413
3.401
3.501
468266
4.13132
4.2116
4.302
4.401
4.501
511

I'm not ready to do a real analysis of this yet, but it's interesting to just take a quick look at the places where there are huge discrepancies and where they're basically the same, and to consider how much of that is changes in naming practices as opposed to quirks of the type of source we're looking at (since these are generally records for a single town, there aren't as many locatives as I'd expect, for example).

Next up is to do the same for the names in Eva Vepřeková's Edice Nejstarší městské knihy litovelské (The Oldest Edition of the Register of Litovel, https://is.muni.cz/th/z03m5/).

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