View Message

This is a reply within a larger thread: view the whole thread

Re: Slavic names
I'd love to but all the books/websites I know aren't translated to English unfortunately. BTW, I've been wondering how do you confirm the validity of data if the source is in say Croatian (or any other language you don't speak) and there is no English translation? ___________________________________________________________
Current favorites:Penelope
Petra
Piper
Poppy
PrairiePaige
Paris
Patrick
Pavel
Pyotr
vote up1vote down

Replies

I don't mind if the sources aren't English, I can usually struggle through it. If I don't speak the language it is always more difficult, but it's usually possible to zero-in on the most useful sections and then do rough translations.
vote up1vote down
One of the most reliable books in Croatian is 'Rjecnik osobnih imena' ('Dictionary of first names')by Mate Šimundic with almost 100 000 names and it covers names used in Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina. He's a well known and respected linguist and onomastic expert, so I believe this book should be trustworthy. The problem is that the book is not available on-line and I really don't know how you could get it (except to buy it in one of our on-line bookstores?).There are many websites available, but their reliability is questionable. The two that seem more or less ok (if a bit superficial) are:http://www.imehrvatsko.net/ -Croatian page
http://www.radiopek.co.yu/onomastikon.htm -Serbian pageI'll see if there are any others that might be useful.ETA: http://www.ringeraja.ba/imena.html

This message was edited 5/27/2009, 6:05 PM

vote up1vote down
I just saw that surprisingly Google can translate from Serbian to English (with the usual problems of current machine translation systems, but far better than nothing), so the Radio Pek site should be useful.While building my own given name database I also noticed that very few information about Slavic names is online. Care to speculate why this might be so?
vote up1vote down
There are also plenty of on-line dictionaries for confirmation. Not sure about Serbian, but here are a couple that are useful for Croatian:http://www.rjecnik.net/
http://www.englesko.hrvatski-rjecnik.com/
http://www.design-ers.net/eh-rjecnik.aspAnd of course if there is something unclear, I'd be more than happy to
help:-)
vote up1vote down