Abstract:
The article deals with the area of geographic names ending in *-j- regarded at the two historical segments as well as the calculations of their number. It has been established that Ukrainian part of the All-Slavonic area of the place names ending in *-j- may be conventionally divided into four parts, namely Northern Western, Western, Central and Northern, each one containing several centres. Two cartographic schemes testify to the fact that the area configuration at the area until the 14-th century and during the 20-th century in fact remained unchanged, the difference is only in their density. Diachronic cartographic schemes enable the detection of place names’ areas according to the chronological period and give a start for further linguistic and historical studies. Statistics of place names in diachronic is relative. The problem is that data is selected from the historical written sources and we can see a direct dependence of an amount of revealed place names on the number of sources. It is found 77 place names ending in *-j- that has been functioning during eight centuries (XIV – ХХІ) and some of them even longer. Composites (Дрогобич, Житомир), names formed from the composites (Любеч, Мирча), names formed from the common names (Гнильче, Стрільче) and calendar names (Степань, Іване) are creating stems of these place names. Motivating bases of the names formed from the composites predominate and it is the evidence of archaism of this type of place names. In XV – ХХ centuries there were neither socio-historical nor lingual preconditions for creating of this type of place names.
