Family names in 14th-15th-century Lubeck: Syntactic and morphological aspects of translation into modern Russian

The analysis of late medieval family names, originating from the Hanseatic cities of Germany, is carried out with the aim of developing linguistically sound methods of transcribing Middle Low German onomastic material for the tasks of historical and philological research. As an additional objective, the study is designed for practical application: to ensure correct translation into modern Russian for the subsequent academic publication of a valuable historical document in the framework of a project supported by the Russian Science Foundation (RSF), currently running at Novosibirsk State University. The source of language material (an onomastic corpus of over 2000 lexemes) is the manuscript Liber memorialis of the city of Lubeck, containing administration records of the magistrate of the Hanseatic metropolis, covering a period between 1318 and the early 16th century. The original codex is held at the Tomsk University library (previously at the City Archive of Lubeck, Germany) and was made available for research by the project team. The family names under analysis belonged to magistrate members and other prominent historical personalia of the city; they sometimes run through several generations and are highly relevant for research, including Russian-Hanseatic relations. The rapidly growing amount of Russian studies concerning Hanseatic cities shows the need of useful and consequent rules of representing the onomastic material, contained in the medieval German texts, in modern Russian. The analysis focuses on morphological and grammatical aspects of the development of family names in 14th-15th-century Lubeck. Due to their secondary character (as semantic derivatives from names of professions, topo- and hydronyms, and personal nicknames) the analysed lexemes reach the status of family names in the course of changes, gradually taking place over a long period. Social and historical circumstances of these changes, their impact on the lexical units, and the possible criteria of establishing their accomplished onomastic status as family names are discussed and methods of overcoming the interfering effect of strong reduction and morphological homonymy, typical of the given language period, are elaborated. Thus, changes in gender, number, morphological type and syntactic behaviour of the analysed units are examined for the purpose of obtaining or verifying their nominative case forms. The resulting onomastic forms are then contrastively faced with the morphological models and declension types available in modern Russian. Recommendations for transcription are offered for every lexical group, while difficult or ambiguous cases are singled out and the possible options are proposed and argued. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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