The article deals with the question of whether the Reformation influenced the naming in Saxony – on the example of Leipzig. On the basis of church books of the Leipzig region and baptismal entries of St. Thomas church in the city of Leipzig can be shown that the Reformation (1539 introduced in Leipzig) has virtually no influence on the naming. One of the reasons for this is the simultaneous advent of naming after godparents.

This paper analyzes the personal names contained in the 1499 tax roll of the St. Klara Monastery at Hof, a town on the north-eastern border of Upper Franconia in Bavaria. At the end of the 15th century among the tenants of this monastery first names of Germanic etymology are already in the minority; names of foreign origin, exclusively saints’ names, are significantly more frequent. – In 1499 also in the rural anthroponymy of the Hof area the system of first name and surname is completely established. Most tenants bear surnames derived from nicknames. The next frequent groups are surnames derived from first names, mainly from first names of Germanic origin, followed by occupational names. Considerably less tenants bear surnames derived from place names or from special traits of their respective residences. All in all, the tax roll of the St. Klara Monastery gives a representative impression of the rural anthroponymy of a small South German area at the end of the Middle Ages only a short time before the Reformation.

Der verschwundene Lancashire-Ort Lox(h)am lag vermutlich in der Gemeinde (parish) Penwortham. Der Ortsname Lox(h)am, der als Familienname überlebt hat, ist ein Kompositum, das aus einem Fluss- oder Bachnamen Lox < britisch *Losko- ‘der Verbogene’ und der Dativpluralform hūsum ‘bei den Häusern’, die formal sowohl altenglisch wie altskandinavisch sein kann, gebildet wird. Die Bedeutung wäre dann ‘bei den Häusern, die in Verbindung mit dem Flüsschen Lox stehen’. In diesem Beitrag wird vielmehr eine skandinavische Etymologie für hūsum bevorzugt. Die Anwesenheit von Skandinaviern in diesem Teil von Lancashire in der Wikingerzeit wird durch das Vorhandensein von skandinavischen Personennamen in mittelalterlichen Privaturkunden bestätigt.

Two historical documents from the 11th and 12th centuries and their onomastic problems for historical and linguistic researches. The paper presents documents about an agreement between the famous bishop Benno of Meißen and a single noble slave named Bor. Some villages near the Elbe River were exchanged in the western territory not far from Dresden. Up till now a convincing localization of some of them is missing. And it is unusual that five villages are named with nine different names. Therefore the article treats some questions with consideration of historical and ecclesiastical connections. The results of an interdisciplinary analysis try to show the progress of Christianizing in the 11th century as well as the foundation of new villages in the 12th century. And a consequence of this development was that the majority of German speakers used new names for old and meanwhile enlarged settlement.

Taking the oldest city directories of Dresden as an example, the article wants to draw the onomasticians’ attention to a special kind of research sources which has been largely ignored thus far. Initial analyses of selected linguistic and onomastic items show that due to the digital accessibility of these corpora more detailed knowledge, mainly concerning the development of personal names in the 18th and 19th centuries, should be possible.

The article deals with three types of Germanic toponyms found in Northern Italy. The type *stôde-gardôn ‘studfarm, horse breeding’, widespread in the Padanian plain between Torino and Verona, seems to have been in the beginning a Langobardic loanword in the regional Italo-Romance idioms. In contrast the place name Gamundio, denoting a royal fisc near Alessandria, has many early parallels in the Frankish regions of the Rhineland, of Lorraine and Belgium, like Sarreguemines/Saargemünd (F, Moselle), 711 Gamundiis < *ga-munthja ‘ground about the mouth of a river’. Also Guastalla north of Reggio- Emilia, 864 Wardi-stalla ‘watchtower, guard’, name of a royal court again, has narrow parallels in the regnum Francorum. So most probably these two toponyms had their origins in the terminology of the Franks.

Remotivation, conceived as a combination of semantic re-interpretation and formal re-segmentation, does not only affect appellative signs, but also proper names. First, remotivation processes are contrasted with demotivation processes (de-semantization and de-segmentation) and it is argued against the claim of uni-directionality. Then, four types of remotivation of proper names are elaborated: the sign-based semantic strategies of (1) reanalysis (of words [folk etymology], of clitics, and of affixes) and (2) pleonastic/tautologic doubling (of morphemes); furthermore the usage-based pragmatic strategies of (3) re-contextualization (of context-independent signs) and (4) re-locution (of illocutively meant signs). These processes turn out to be high-grade contingent in the way which linguistic material the speakers/hearers grasp to do their remotivation.

The aim of this article is to show connections between the course of early and high medieval old streets and the occurrence of place name types with their specific time composition. The names of the towns on the Baierweg long-distance route linking Bavaria and Bohemia are examined here as examples. The determination of the etymology is followed by a typological evaluation, which shows the important role of the Baierweg as an orientation axis for settlement activity in the later early Middle Ages.

The libros de repartimiento are a type of text that has an enormous value to understand the historical moment that gave rise to the process of the formation of the toponymy as we know it today in the areas incorporated to the Spanish speaking territory in different moments of the historical process traditionally known as Reconquista. A text of this type exists also for the Sevillian municipality of Écija, although this one presents some peculiarities that differentiate it from other repartimientos. In this study we analyze in detail the toponymy contained in the medieval text and reconstruct the context in which the territory was recognized by the persons in charge of the distribution of the lands. The conclusions that we extract are of great interest to know the process of creation of names based on Castilian and the context of linguistic contact that allowed the transmission of names from one stratum to another.

The article focusses on names used for the denomination of legendary figures in Bavaria (especially in the Eastern Part of Bavaria and in the Bavarian Forest). In the beginning, short information on the cultural sciences of the issue will be presented, followed by terminological classification. The main part illustrates patterns of denomination concerning the selected legendary figures.