Or and Vert

The Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources (DMNES) is one of my very favorite sources for documenting SCA names, but it can be hard to navigate, and it doesn’t have an easy built-in interface for just browsing names by culture. This is unfortunate, given that one of the ways a lot of names heralds like to handle consults is to hand your submitter a list of names to see if any of them stand out. Just because it doesn’t have an easily browsable interface, though, doesn’t mean it’s not possible to use it to generate lists of names by culture! I stumbled on this awhile back, and figured I’d write up a quick how-to. Fundamentally, this hinges on the fact that the sources for each name in the DMNES are meticulously cited, and that citation is bidirectional: not only is there a link to the source in each individual name’s citation, but each source text has links to every single name that’s listed from that source. The trick is getting the link to each source for your target cu...

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...

Here's a too-detailed list of the heraldry projects I've got on my docket at the moment. I'm putting it here for accountability, as much as anything else, and so I can look back at it later when I've finished all of them. (This list doesn't include the usual consults and commentary arguments in varying stages of completion, because those are constant.) Personal projects: Write up the research I did for my name into an article on Czech byname patterns. probably also do more research to flesh this out some; I mostly only did enough research to justify the name I wanted, and there are more patterns than just the ones I used. Possibly just split this into an article series instead of a single one, because otherwise it'll never see the light of day. submit this to Palimpsest for an edit to SENA Appendix A Pull out dated lists of Czech given names and bynames from the sources I already have. names (given, byname, construction) in Vepřeková names (given, byname, constr...