This dictionary is a necessary update of F. Bechtel, Die historischen Personennamen (1917) (HPN). The aim is to update Bechtel's manual by adding about 40,000 names carried by Hellenophone people in the time from High Archaism to the beginning of the Byzantine era, thus going beyond HPN. Consequently, Bechtel's original corpus, which includes 15,000 names, has increased by 140% in this new work.
The volume includes an introduction of 40 pages, in which Minon presents the aim of the dictionary, instructions for its use, the morpho-syntactic taxonomy of the main types of anthroponyms and the epistemological issues that researchers have tried to clarify and to define. In this part of the introduction Minon outlines, at first, the history of Greek onomatology from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Next, she highlights the criteria for integrating interlinguistic names, specifically names that have different forms of interaction between languages in contact. Finally, she deals with the dynamics of anthroponymic composition. She examines the semantic interpretations of Greek dates by the inversion of the reading order, formal restructuring by inversion of bases and historical recombination of asyntactic character, that is arbitrary combination of radicals qualified as ‘irrational’.
The Lexonyme is organised alphabetically into etymological and semantic entries. The analysis of the semantism of anthroponyms is based on the motivations of their choice: (i) etymological meaning; (ii) ideological and cultural representations; (iii) heritage transmission. Under each etymological entry and lexical sub-entry the hierarchy of names is onomastic and based on the principles applied by Bechtel: the compound names come first, followed by their derivatives and finally the short forms with single-based compounds.
The volume is a useful tool for a better understanding of the meaning of anthroponyms. It is marked by its originality in including a semantic profound analysis of the lexemes, in providing phonetic and/or morphological remarks as well as rich bibliographical references to specific topics. Nevertheless, we regret the absence of a systematic study of the personal names that occurred in Linear B, which would be a welcome and necessary update of O. Landau's Mykenische Personennamen (1958).
