Geography · Toponymy
Toponymy & Onomastics
Toledano comes from Toledo. How many surnames are addresses? What surnames keep of places — and places, of names.
Every Jewish place bears several names — Biblical Hebrew, rabbinic Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, Ladino, Judeo-Spanish, the local language in its historical and modern spelling. Every surname tells of an ancestral geography.
This subsection makes these multiple toponyms interoperable and connects surnames to their geographical origin, allowing a Toledano to see Toledo and a Fassi to see Fez.
Examples of multilingual toponyms
| Canonical place | Linguistic and historical variants |
|---|---|
| Jérusalem | Yerushalayim (he) · al-Quds (ar) · Gerusalemme (it) · Hierosolyma (la) |
| Fès | Fas (ar) · פאס (he) · Fez (en historique) |
| Thessalonique | Salonique (fr) · Selanik (tr/ladino) · Saloniki (grec) · Salonica (ladino) |
| Livourne | Livorno (it) · Leghorn (en historique) · ליוורנו (he) |
| Le Caire | al-Qāhira (ar) · Fustat (historique médiéval) · מצרים (he talmudique) |
Zakhor's search engine works indifferently across all these variants.
Geolocated surnames
Planned features
- Multilingual search insensitive to spelling and transliteration variants
- Etymological entries for each major toponym
- Reverse index surname ↔ place of origin with degree of certainty
- Mapping of surnames: « Where are the Corcos found today? »