ATTILA T. SZABO THE ONOMATOLOGIST

Attila T. Szabó was an excellent onomatologist; his scholarly career started with collecting toponyms. Throughout his life, he was considering publication of the historical place name material he had collected but, for political reasons, the possibility never arose. For a short time, then, he turned to studying personal names, especially historical nicknames; and after that, he began working on the monumental series of The Transylvanian Hungarian Historical Dictionary. Nevertheless, the publication of his data on historical place names, approximately a million items, was something he never totally gave up. Had it appeared in print, this huge Transylvanian historical place name material would have been very useful for the development of toponymy both in Hungary and in Romania. The manuscript collection that has survived among his posthumous papers will now be published by the Society of Hungarian Linguistics in some twelve volumes. The material of seven counties has already been published.