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Parker ( R. ) (ed.) Personal Names in Ancient Anatolia . (Proceedings of the British Academy 191.) Pp. xii + 243, ills, maps. Oxford : Oxford University Press for the British Academy , 2013. Cased, £50, US$99. ISBN: 978-0-19-726563-5 .
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There are two distinct communities conducting research in the domain of Ancient Anatolian personal names. On the one hand, a number of Classicists show a keen interest in this area, in particular through their contributions to the Asia Minor volumes of the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (LGPN). On the other hand, the study of 'indigenous' (i.e. pre-Greek) personal names of Asia Minor is associated with a smaller group of scholars, sometimes with a background in Indo-European Comparative Linguistics or Ancient Near Eastern Studies. There are certain differences in the approaches to the study of onomastics that characterise these professional communities.
The peculiarity of the sociolinguistic situation in pre-Hellenic Anatolia, in contrast to, for example, Mesopotamia or Greece, is a bewildering variety of distinct languages spoken in the overlapping areas and attested to different extents. Therefore Hittitologists and other specialists in Bronze and Early Iron Age Asia Minor tend to be very sensitive to differences in the linguistic backgrounds of personal names, to the point that sometimes determining such a background represents the main goal of their research. By contrast, the onomastic systems of individual languages or groups have rarely been holistically investigated. Only recently have publications appeared that attempt to describe systematically the structure of Indo-European Anatolian names, such as Die hethitischen Frauennamen by T. Zehnder (2010).
In contrast to specialists in, say, Lydian or Phrygian, the Hellenists who work on the Greek names of Asia Minor normally have a good understanding of their etymologies. They are, therefore, well equipped to...