Reconstructing Language History by Using a Phonological Ontology. An Analysis of German Surnames

AbstractThis paper applies the ontology-baseddialectometric technique of Engsterhold(2020) to surnames. The method wasoriginally developed for phonetic analyses. However, as will be shown, it is also suitedfor the study of graphemic representations. Based on data from the German SurnameAtlas (DFA), the method is optimized forgraphemic analysis and illustrated with anexample case.