The oldest odonyms of Lviv

Street names were not often the subject of thorough research. The authors mostly record the first mention of a street in the sources but never notice the process (in some cases quite long) of the name formation. This research focuses on the names that were used for a short time or disappeared together with the object around which they signified the space. The sources of this work were the four oldest city books of Lviv: the book of the council and the bench court, two books of income and expenditure, and the book of a bench, covering the period 1382–1448, although with certain intervals. Such sources are heterogeneous, but they record the names in different areas of use, which statistically only emphasizes the constant use of such names. The goals of this study are to collect all the oldest odonyms of Lviv from preserved sources and publish their translation into Ukrainian; to present the chains of their formation; and to analyze the names of streets that no longer exist. The methodological framework of the research is based on the ontological approach to space, which means the study of relations, connections, and interactions between the actual names and denotatum-objects, i.e. the terrain that describes the name. Also we used the genetic method, which consists in the sequential disclosure of the origin and development of a historical phenomenon and aims to study the dynamics of the object’s evolution through time. After compiling the database, the sufficient availability of factual material allowed to use a typological method through which, based on common features, it was possible to distinguish two types of street names: proper names and descriptive names. The first type includes established names that have the denotatum “street”. The second includes the names without denotatum; they often have a preposition (however, they invariably perform an informative function). In the list where the found odonyms are sorted according to the chronology of use, we can trace their stages of formation. Some of the names are conditionally localized. The summary asserts that almost all found odonyms in the city centre were formed by the middle of the 15th century and were almost invariably used in the following years. In the suburbs, there are only a few names. Since the suburbs were developed rather slowly until the 16th century, there was practically no need for new odonyms.