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[Facts] Re: Slavic names
in reply to a message by Sofia
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.
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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

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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?
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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:-)
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