Multicultural references in Romanian anthroponomy of medieval Transylvania

Abstract

This paper analyzes medieval onomastics in the Romanian historical province of Transylvania (11th–14th centuries), a multicultural area, corresponding to the ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity of the population. The different ethnic communities are ruled by a unique administrative authority, but the multicultural environment exercises a major influence on the personal names of each ethnic group by distinguishing the names according to several aspects: ethnic criteria, the manifestation of unilateral or reciprocal onomastic influences, the adaptation of borrowed names to the specificity of each language and the alteration of the popular names in use in written variants, established as officially Latinized forms.