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Dass sich Namen und Recht in einem Schnittbereich befinden, wird dann besonders deutlich, wenn man von Namengeboten und Namenverboten, z.B. bei der Benennung von Personen oder Waren, betroffen ist. Erstaunlich ist, dass weder die Rechtswissenschaft noch die Onomastik sich mit dem Schnittbereich gemeinsam und interdisziplinär auseinandergesetzt haben. Dieses Manko wollte die Tagung „Namen und Recht in Europa“ am 16. und 17. April 2015 in Regensburg, gemeinsam veranstaltet von der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Namenforschung und dem Arbeitskreis Sprache und Recht der Universität Regensburg, beseitigen.

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Humans order their world by assigning names, that is, by means of “designation”. We name children, fellow humans, animals and plants according to our respective language. And we can just as easily extinguish a name if it strikes us as the appropriate thing to do. This is the also the task of philosophy: to grasp the world via the right “concepts”, a reduction of complexity through naming. To “grasp” the world also means to master it. In this respect, the assignment of names and titles as well as the strict connexion of a name with a bodily person (identity) is a characteristic means or instrument of domination tied to the modern state.]

Contrasting company names such as, e.g., HeidelbergCement AG or Vivacon AG and trademarked brand names for products and services such as, e.g., Labetrunk für Magenleidende (trademarked in 1894) or Maaloxan (a current name for a remedy against stomach complaints) is interesting from the perspective of law, economy and language. On the legal side, there are opposing requirements for the motivation of such names, i.e. for the possibility of inferring characteristics of the company or the product. For product names, motivation should be as low as possible. What would be ideal in this respect would be completely unmotivated, but maximally distinctive “labels” without any relation to other names or other existing words. Company names, in contrast, at least until the change in trade law in the year 1998, had to be strongly motivated with regard to the associates / owners / founders as well as to the object and location of the company. For economic reasons, however, companies prefer medium degrees of motivation for both names types, to a certain extent describing the company and its products positively or at least creating positive associations. The linguistic means available to the name creators for solving this problem are presented in a systematic way in this paper. The data basis is the Waarenzeichenblatt, later Warenzeichenblatt, today Markenblatt, in which since 1894 until the present all newly protected brand names are published. This historical material allows for investigating the use of the relevant linguistic means in brand names from the beginnings until the first decade of the 21st century. With the 21st century and the “Third Reich”, two epochs are in focus which clearly demonstrate the dependence of the linguistic form on extralinguistic factors deriving from the domains of law, politics, economy and society

Deutsches Gewässernamenbuch – a resource for Swedish onomasticians. – The publication of Albrecht Greule’s magnificent work Deutsches Gewässernamenbuch (DGNB) in 2014 was an event of European significance. Consulting this extensive dictionary makes it much easier than before to obtain information about the wide-ranging and important German research undertaken in the field of hydronymy. The material dealt with in DGNB is of great interest from a lexicographic, morphological and semantic point of view. The present author has found many hydronyms in DGNB that merit consideration in the study of Swedish place-names.

Low German is widely associated with such terms as humour, congeniality, and honesty. They are a result of the tension in the national language’s variational spectrum. This is reflected in the choice of names für North German clubs and associations, clubs devoted to the maintenance of local and regional traditions in the broadest sense: a history club is called Tru un fast, a theater club Snackfatt, and a choir Plattdeutsche Schreihälse, for example. Such names are gaining momentary importance in the description of linguistic landscapes attesting to the multilingualism and charm of a region. In tourism and its search for authenticity, this is in fact economic capital. The science of onomastics should pay more attention to the names and naming of clubs.

The focus is on the name(s) of the Merovingian pretender Ballomeris–Gundovald (†585). Notwithstanding the prejudice of many historians Ballomeris is not an invective but a given name. The component -meris was characteristically for traditional names of princely Francs (4th to 6th century), the component gunthi- appears more ‘modern’. (Furthermore the stems balþa > ballo ‘brave’ and vald ‘to rule’ were often confused.) So the change of name reflects the changing role from illegitimate son of a king to a claimant for dynastical participation and at least for kingship. Unfortunately the perspective of the prejudice mentioned above hampered for a long time the consideration of Ballomeris as a name (not as a word) and blocked the use of onomastics in this case.

The onomatology traditionally assumes that -ingen (and -heim) ending toponyms are the oldest Germanic place names and date back to the Migration Period. Because these earliest place names always start with a personal name, it is believed that linguistic research could be able to reconstruct the names of the town founders out of them. However, the earliest place names are mentioned for the first time in the written records of the 8th to 12th centuries. The study shows that the personal names in the toponyms are still changing in the earliest documents of the 8th/9th century. Therefore, it seems not possible to reconstruct the personal names – and the persons – contained in the toponyms and to assign them to the town founders of the alemannic settlement period.

The article reviews vol. 6 of the significant Deutscher Familiennamenatlas (Atlas of German Surnames) by Kathrin Dräger. The book is considered to be an essential work on today’s patronymic surnames. By disclosing their structure and geographic distribution the author simultaneously takes an innovative approach to the occurence of the underlying first names in the (late) Middle Ages. Furthermore, the article emphasizes that the complete atlas as it now stands is not only a milestone in anthroponomastics but also a prime example of scientific organization and the sustainable promotion of junior scientists.