Or and Vert

One of the best resources for consulting heralds is Appendix A of SENA , as that provides lists of name patterns that do not require further documentation, sorted by language group. If you're not particularly familiar with a given language (and even if you are!), it's a fantastic resource to help you construct historically-plausible names using a structure that's been previously documented to period, without needing to reinvent the wheel every time. Things like "late period English names can use double bynames" or "French descriptive/occupational bynames may use the article le, la, l', les or un/une or omit it." Not every language is represented, but it's a fantastic starting point and one that I point every new consulting herald towards. The Czech table, so far, has been empty, with merely the note "Czech: All patterns in Czech must be documented. Academy of Saint Gabriel report 3244 ( http://www.s-gabriel.org/3244.txt ) gives some leads fo...

 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 Štefko...