The Church, a significant power in medieval Europe, exerted a long-lasting influence on Hungarian place nomenclature. A considerable number of today’s Hungarian settlement names referring to (i) the former possession of a clergyman; and (ii) the former possession of a religious order developed in the Middle Ages and are well attested in medieval historical sources. Based on a corpus of relevant toponyms, this paper presents the cultural and linguistic history of these place names. The study explores such topics as: factors contributing to the survival of the observed settlement names; the prevailing morphological, syntactic and semantic structures recognizable in the name forms; sound and structural changes affecting the surveyed settlement names; and today’s native speakers’ (mis)conceptions of the Church as an early possessor of habitations in the country.
Key words:
Hungarian, settlement names, Christianity, Church, possession history
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