The geographical conditions of the largest county of Hungary in the Árpád Era were varied. Its onomastic corpus is particularly rich, and its population is not homogeneously Hungarian. The book deals with the stratum of settlement names of the onomastic stock of the county published in A régi Bihar vármegye településneveinek történeti-etimológiai szótára [A historical-etymological dictionary of the settlement names of historical Bihar County] (Anita Rácz, Debrecen, 2007). The aim of the study is the exploration of the onomatosystematical and linguistic connections from a historical-etymological perspective.
The volume consists of five extensive units. The first chapter gives an overall view the history of settlements in the county with regard not only to the Hungarian population but also to foreign ethnicities (Seklers, Turkic tribes, Slavs, Vlachs)
The second chapter presents the historical outline and methods of research on old toponyms.
The examination of the early Hungarian toponymicon can extend our knowledge of Hungarian historical phonetics and dialect history. Since the toponymicon of a given region always creates its own unique system, onomatogeographical investigations examinations can provide insights into the phonetic, morphological, and lexical characteristics of the regional dialect. Such an analysis of the onomastic corpus can be found in the next voluminous chapter.
The fourth and fifth chapters contain the onomatosystematical research of the settlement names. The central part of the work is their descriptive analysis. Toponyms as constituents of the vocabulary can be analyzed in two ways: from either a functional-semantic or a lexical-morphological aspect. The organic unity of these two levels is shown through their simultaneously discussion. The analysis starts from the consideration of the functional-semantic features, to which the examination of lexical elements linked to particular semantic types is attached.
The last chapter is devoted to the genesis of the names and their structural transformation. The rules governing the genesis of place names can be the same as those determining the formation and alteration of common words: there are separable external and internal name formation methods, within which these groups, representing different types of their genesis, can be established. The categories of external name formation are based on the different groups of origin of the borrowed names. Endogenous names fall into the following categories: names having emerged through 1. syntagmatic structuring, 2. morphemic structuring, 3. semantic name-giving, 4. name-giving with structural changes. The onomastic corpus is surveyed according to methods of name formation listed here.