The Nienburg fragment, named after Nienburg Monastery from where it originated around 1180, starts with a problematic list of several place names as Lighinici, Zrale, Crocovva, Cotibus, that have been implicitly connected so far to Kraków (Poland), to Liegnitz / Legnica as well as to Strehlen / Strzelin in Silesia, and to Cott bus in Lower Lusatia. The authors follow the historian Rudolf Lehmann in his assumption that these places were former stops along the way thus linking Zrale to Strehla on the River Elbe, Crocovva to the desolate Krakau at Königsbrück on the River Pulsnitz. Lighinici, which hasn’t been located yet, can be placed with the help of linguistic research to the desolate place Leichen (Lichen) near Dürrenberg on the River Saale (Sachsen-Anhalt). The number of place-names that include ‚Kirche’ (church) and ‚Markt’ (market) seems like a kind of travel-guide leading from the monastery at Nienburg to its holdings in Lower Lusatia.

When entering the Carpathian Basin in the 9th century, the Hungarians found a decisively Slavic population on the territory, so toponyms were formed based on the already existing toponymic system. Hungarian toponymic research has been able to reconstruct toponyms from the period prior to the Hungarian conquest only very scarcely and ambiguously – as opposed to the names of larger rivers, which show strong continuity, going back to very early times. The toponyms of the Carpathian Basin, in connection with the formation of the settlement structures of Hungarians, can almost exclusively be documented from the period after the Hungarian conquest. However, the Carpathian Basin became a “meeting point of the peoples” in the centuries after the conquest in 896 and as such, numerous ethnics and languages could be found here: Slavic peoples and Germans settled in larger blocks, while smaller groups of Turkish people, such as Cumans and Pechenegs, and some Neo-Latin peoples (Walloons and later Rumanians) also contributed to the ethnic and linguistic diversity in the area. The layering of different peoples and languages influenced toponyms too, which also allows us to investigate language contacts of the time. This is the main concern of my paper, with special focus on the question of how these phenomena can be connected to issues of language prestige in the Middle Ages.

In 2009 the oldest documents concerning the place Greiz in Eastern Thuringia were published by a historian. This article now provides a linguistic approach to that publication and its interpretation of the mentioned area in Medieval times. The results may be considered as a contribution to a book of reference for place names of Eastern Thuringia. In this respect some questions have been asked, e. g. whether the region along the river Weiße Elster between the places Weida and Plauen had really been an unsettled area until the 12th century. There is hard evidence that the historian’s assumptions are wrong because of the obvious Slavonic names of settlements in this area dating from the 8th until the 10th centuries. Based on a document from 1209 – respectively its copy from 1510 – as well as on a document from 1225 several facts are discussed in detail with consequences for toponymy and history of settlement with the help of historical linguistics. Thus it becomes evident that it is necessary to exchange ideas and to communicate for representatives of history as well as linguistics. At the same time it is obvious that the publication of documents and their analysis by historians will always be very helpful for linguistic exploitation. As a result the prospective edition of a historical dictionary of place names in Thuringia or of Eastern Thuringia respectively has been asserted as dependent on the continuous co-operation between historians and linguists.

During the last decade Prof. Udolph has published a series of at least five articles, in which he argued that the until then unanimously accepted etymology of the place-name Magdeburg ‘City of (the) Virgin(s)’ must be wrong. In these articles he also refuted the less widely known etymology that argues for Magdeburg to be the ‘City of camomilla’. Comparing this and other place-names containing the element Magde‑, Magade‑ vel sim. to others containing the first member Mikil‑, Michel‑ etc. ‘big, great’ he reached the conclusion that Magde‑, Magade‑ etc. should be an adjective meaning something like ‘great, mighty ’ as well. His morphological and phonological arguments for doing so are here refuted by showing that neither is the prototype for his proposed adjective Germ. *magaþ‑, Germ. *nakuađ‑ ‘naked’, etymologically sufficiently clear, nor is there any other way to produce the required word-structure either by Germanic or by Indo-European means of word-formation. Though the author of this article is also not very glad about the older explanations, they have the advantage of simply being morphologically and phonologically flawless.