The Bodrog and Borsod counties used to be regions of the Hungarian language territory that were situated a long way from each other and had different natural and socio-geographical potentialities. What the author examines in her work is whether these differences are reflected in the settlement name system which can be reconstructed on the basis of the available data, and if yes to what extent they affect the whole name system and its proportions. The study also seeks an answer to the question of whether there are any region-specific name giving habits observable or the differences emerge only in smaller. subgroups.

The corpus of the study is the list of settlement names taken from György Györffy’s monumental work Az Árpád-kori Magyarország történeti földrajza [Historical geography of Hungary in the Árpád Era] (1. Budapest, 1963) which can be applied to Bodrog and Borsod counties. The first substantial part contains the historical-etymological dictionary of the names of the two counties names. After a list of authentically transliterated varieties of settlement names the entries contain their most widely accepted etymological explanations and give insights into questions of their phonetic and orthographic history.

The second part of the volume presents the results of the comparative onomatosystematical analysis. The model of analysis used for the examination is an extended version of István Hoffmann’s multiple-level method of place name description (Helynevek nyelvi elemzése [The linguistic analysis of toponyms]. Debrecen, 1993). In accordance with Hoffmann’s method, the observations derived from functional-semantic analysis are separated from those made about the historical conditions in which a toponym emerged. The fundamental conclusion that can be drawn from the comparison is that the onomasystems of the two counties were similar in their main traits in the time of the Árpád dynasty and their proportional numbers did not differ significantly from each other. As opposed to this, there was a striking difference in the name groups of foreign origin, the reason for this is likely to have been the greater ethnic homogeneity of Bodrog county during the formation of the onomasystem. In some subcategories disparities can also be seen, for instance in Bodrog the proportion of settlement names with a reference to the church of the village is four times those in Borsod county, which may be accounted for by factors of church organisation and cultural history.