Not all place names are unique, and certain place names are – or used to be – name twins or even name multiples. In a corpus of around 1200 place names from German speaking Switzerland it was found that nearly a quarter of them share the original name form with at least one other name (etymological or primary homonyms). Today, the originally identical name forms are either the same or differ from each other. A smaller part of the corpus consists of place names that show the same name form today but derive from different original name forms (secondary homonyms). This article explores the possibility of classifying place names according to the concept of homonymy, which is familiar primarily in relation to common nouns and has not been examined with regard to place names before. As a first step, the place names were classified into types of homonymy (total or partial homonymy). Subsequently, the processes that lead from the original name form to today’s name form – either parallel to or different from each other – were investigated and characterized. The aim was to explore the influencing factors affecting the development of the name forms. It was found that the geographical distance between the places involved can have a major influence on the development of the names. However, phonological processes, writing conventions in administration, morphology and folk etymology also play an important role.

The author proposes a new interpretation of the history of the name of the former Saxon village and historical burgward Magdeborn. First, the endings -<u>/-<un> of <Medeburu(n)>, as Thietmar von Merseburg writes in his chronicle of 1012/1018, get a new explanation as *-ow or *-own. Second, it seems that both a linguistic and extralinguistic analysis of the obviously false interpretation of the Old Sorbian place name quoted by the chronicler himself may show the history of the place name in a new light. It is guessed that the chronicler had misunderstood the narrative about the name of the castle. A detailed analysis is offered of two other cases – the persiflage of the Kyrie eleison by Slavs as ukrivolsa and the mysterious provincia Nice – in which Thietmar seems to approach certain facts and their narration with a similar lack of comprehension. In conclusion, it is assumed that an earlier form of the oikonym Magdeborn was a semantically plural term: *Medobori or *Medoborьje, meaning ‚honey pine forest(s)‘. The two basic hypotheses about the oldest history of the name enable to think of a development from a plural regional name to an adjectival oikonym derived from the first. A third hypothesis goes still further in assuming that the name *Medobori or *Medoborьje had been developed from *Medjiborьje/ *Medziborьje, ‚among pine forests‘.

Even after having achieved international fame with his fantastic stories, the Romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann considered himself more as a musician and composer than as a writer. In his theoretical writings about music, he extolled the value of dissonances, though he produced them rather more in his poetic works than in his musical compositions. These dissonances can be distinctly perceived in the proper names found in his fairy tale The King’s Bride which, with the exception of the river Main and the personal name Anna/ Ännchen, are all invented by Hoffmann.

Many family names in Germany were Latinised under the influence of Renaissance Humanism by adding the suffixes ‑us or ‑ius (so-called Humanist names). These suffixes differ regarding their number of syllables and their impact on the prosody of the family name. The suffix ‑ius, when added to a family name consisting of at least two syllables, always leads to a shift of the accent (Cremér-ius), whereas this is not necessarily the case with ‑us (Móllerus / Mollérus). It appears that structures consisting of a disyllabic German family name and the suffix ‑ius are particularly frequent and that this suffix is often preceded by a nasal or a liquid. Clearly this pattern could also be applied if the underlying family name was monosyllabic. In this case a supplementary syllable was added such as ‑en or ‑el (Franck – Franck-én-ius). The suffix ‑us – apart from its use in patronymics (Arnold‑us) – was of little significance in the forming of Humanist names, however.

The article focuses on place names in the canton of Lucerne in Central Switzerland. It deals with the place-name elements -guet and -hof, the Swiss German appellatives Guet (‚piece of land, farm‘) and Hof (‚court, farm‘), and the phrase Hof und Guet. Based on the corpus compiled by the research project Luzerner Namenbuch it presents an analysis of their distribution. It is shown that both the names, the appellatives and its phrase are rare in the sources from the eastern area (the Rigi mountain region) compared to the western region of Entlebuch. The last part of the article focuses on the example of Källerhof, where it is shown how the context interacts with the name and how there may be different names for the same object through time.

No description available.

Following Slavic immigration in the 7th century a Slavic tribal region developed on the lower Zwickauer Mulde river in the area of Rochlitz, the city mentioned as urbs and burgwardus Rochelinzi by Thietmar von Merseburg between 1014 and 1018. The region included 52 settlements, most of which were on land between 61 und 71 ground control points, a few above that. Thirteen of these villages had a name with the suffix -(ov)ici, three had a name of the type Kosobudy/Žornosěky. These represent the oldest class of names and the centre of the area. The later place names, with the suffixes -jь, -in and -ov based on personal names, appear in the centre as well as on the outskirts, where a greater number of place names based on appellatives are found. Some names such as Zschauitz and Kralapp, along with many other place names between the Elbe and Saale rivers, have exact equivalents in Bohemia and Moravia. They provide evidence of the immigrants’ origin.

Minor names or microtoponyms are typically collected and analysed in etymological dictionaries. However, this may not be the most productive method in every case. More importantly, names should be analysed within the context of the communication community whose members created and used them. In rural settlements, these were primarily landowners. With the threefield crop rotation system (Dreifelderwirtschaft), which dominated agriculture in Central Europe from the Middle Ages until the 19th century, farmers had to be in constant discourse about the areas under cultivation, and this was not possible without using microtoponyms. For this reason, land users in each and every village established a special system of nomination within their local subdistrict. A detailed investigation of these names, taking account of this local perspective and considering the geographical, linguistic, sociolinguistic, ecological and historical context, identifies the specific reasons behind each individual nomination, which is very helpful in determining the meaning of more or less frequent name elements in general. Thus, only detailed studies of this kind provide a sound basis for various analyses – etymological, cognitive and others – of microtoponyms in general. This is demonstrated with the example of one local subdistrict, namely, a deserted village in a hilly and forested part of the countryside between Berlin and Leipzig. The minor names there have to be extracted from artificial nominations for land parcels, created for the purposes of land reallocation in the 19th century. The names were analysed and subsequently set in relation to the context suggested by different archival sources.

No description available.

No description available.