New book release – Kristýna Kovářová: Hydronymie povodí Ostravice: jména řek, potoků, rybníků a studánek [Hydronyms in the Ostravice River Basin: Names of the rivers, streams, ponds and springs]

Kovářová’s new book presents research into the hydronymy of Ostravice River Basin in the Moravian-Silesian Region (Czech Republic), i.e. the names of hydrographic features within this territory. The monograph explores not only the names of streams and rivers which flow directly or indirectly into the Ostravice (e.g. the Lučina river), but also the names of lakes/reservoirs (the Šance reservoir), waterfalls (Bučací vodopád) and wells (Cyrilka, Zanedbaná).

The subject-matter and methodology of the monograph draw on the Hydronymia Europaea project, which has developed a Europe-wide standardized approach, as well as its Slovak application Hydronymia Slovaciae. Their aim is to create a unified system of territorially defined hydronymy covering not only Slovakia, but the whole of Europe.

The core of the monograph lies in the chapters Names of watercourses and Names of water bodies, sources and waterfalls; these chapters consist of alphabetically arranged entries about current hydronyms. The structure of the entries draws on the lexicographic methods developed as part of the two above-mentioned projects. Each entry thus contains not only a chronological listing of the historic forms of the names (excerpted from various map-type sources, documents, administrative texts and tourist guides), but also information about the features that bear these names (the precise location of a water source, or the confluences and length of watercourses). The entries also contain a list of proper names that are motivationally connected with the hydronym (toponyms, anthroponyms, chrematonyms). The final section of each entry presents an explanatory account of all the names and their variants, focusing particularly on the motivation for their formation and also giving references to literature on their etymology, semantic content or other relevant data.

The book was published in Czech, with abstracts in Polish, English, and German.

Key words: onomastics, toponomastics, hydronyms, Hydronymia Europaea, Czech hydronymy, Ostravice river

Available at: Pavelmervart or Oushop

Mgr. Kristýna Kovářová, PhD., is an assistant professor at the Department of Czech Language, Faculty of Arts, University of Ostrava (Czech Republic). She is specializing in onomastics, Czech for Foreigners and Morphology. Her main focus is research of toponyms, especially hydronyms.