The article analyses three place names, which have been explained up to now in the following way: one of them was supposed to be of German, one of Old European and one of Slavic origin. As we show in our paper, all of them are Slavic names, two of them are hydronyms.

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.

Aus dem gedrängten Überblick geht hervor, dass der Benennung von Siedlungen oft georgische Baumbezeichnungen zugrunde liegen, die unterschiedlicher Herkunft sind. Diejenigen Bezeichnungen, die offenbar kartwelischen Ursprungs sind, bilden drei Gruppen: 1. solche, die sich für die kartwelische Grundsprache rekonstruieren lassen (d. h. wo auch swanische Entsprechungen vorliegen), 2. solche, die bis auf die jüngere georgisch-sanische Grundsprache zurückgehen, und 3. nur in der georgischen Sprache belegbare Bezeichnungen, für die sich kein regelmäßig entsprechendes Material der anderen Kartwelsprachen beibringen lässt. Hinzu kommen jene georgischen Baumbezeichnungen, die aus anderen Sprachen entlehnt worden sind. Der Vergleich der georgischen Baumnamen mit der betreffenden Lexik der anderen Kartwelsprachen und mit den rekonstruierten Grundformen zeigt, dass bei der Entstehung der georgischen Oikonyme die Aufspaltung der kartwelischen Grundsprache in die heutigen Einzelsprachen bereits abgeschlossen war. Zu der gleichen Folgerung führt die Einbeziehung jener Oikonyme, die auf Lehnwörtern fußen, die nur im Georgischen (aber nicht im Mingrelischen, Lasischen und Swanischen) vertreten sind.

Family names derived from names of local origin are not at the top of the frequency lists. Potentially any place name may become a family name. In the following, this investigation addresses the question whether all Saxonian family names have become family names, and shows the large advances which can be achieved especially for this group of names with the aid of modern onomastic distribution maps.

Whereas in Sachsen, Brandenburg or Schleswig-Holstein all place names are worked on, the examination of the meaning of many place names in Sachsen-Anhalt is still a desideratum. This article surveys the meaning of the older place names in the former Landkreis Sangerhausen (southern Sachsen-Anhalt) – current and deserted place names – in the territorial boarders of the period 1990 –2007, as well as their level of research based on the author\'s Master\'s degree thesis of the winter semester 2007/08. The author gathered all documentary evidences that could be found in the written sources of regionally specific source books from the first naming in the sources to the 15th / 16th century. The reseach revealed that the oldest names were to be found near the rivers and on most fertile grounds. These place names were mostly derivatives, but one can find also some very old compounds.

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.

The oldest forms of the place-name Leipzig, i.e. Libzi, Libiz vel sim., are now generally assumed to be Slavic, i.e. Old Sorabian derivatives of an older river-name, probably of Germanic origin. At the basis of this river-name is thought to be an enlarged root PIE *lei̯‑bh‑ ‘to flow, drip’. As the concept of root enlargement is somewhat problematic and should thus better be abandoned, it is claimed here – based on a recently published idea for the etymologization of the name of the river Elbe – that this assumed Germanic river-name is a derivative of an unenlarged root with the suffix PIE *‑bho‑. This suffix was used to form colour adjectives on the one hand and action nouns vel sim. on the other. Theoretical proto-forms of the river-name are PIE *h2lei̯H‑bho‑ or *h2liH‑bho‑ ‘making/being dirty/filthy’, PIE *lei̯H‑bho‑ or *liH‑bho‑ ‘nestling up against, winding itself’, PIE *lei̯H‑bho‑ or *liH‑bho‑ ‘pouring out’ (→ ‘flowing’?), PIE *lei̯h2‑bho‑ or *lih2‑bho‑ ‘dwindling, disappearing’, PIE *(s)lei̯H‑bho‑ or *(s)liH‑bho‑ ‘blue(ish)’, and PIE *(s)lei̯‑bho‑ ‘slippery, slimy’. A further theoretical possibility is the reconstruction as PIE *lei̯p-o‑ ‘sticky’ vel sim. (> ‘muddy’?). And finally, a reconstruction seems possible regarding the whole name not as a derivative, but as a compound with PIE *‑h2p-o‑ (the zero-grade of PIE *h2ep- ‘water’) as the second member. In this case, the same roots which form the bases of the derivatives are used as the first members of these compounds. All proposals show semantics acceptable for the formation of river-names. Thus no final decision between these proposals is possible.

This article is based on a speech delivered in Vienna on the occasion of Peter Wiesinger’s 75th birthday. It deals in four chapters with the current state of research on Upper German onomastics. Against the background of Peter Wiesinger’s extensive onomastic work, the article seeks on the one hand to evaluate onomastic basic research with its linguistic and interdisciplinary evaluation, and on the other hand attempts to promote the popularisation of what the world of scholarship knows today about place names.

In this article the Nienburg fragment from about 1180 is under linguistic scrutiny. The three eastern provinciae of the Nienburg Monastery situated in the historical eastern Lusatia are differentiated with help of linguistic methods according to particular paragraphs of the document. Special attention is given to some toponyms which could not have been attributed to definite places yet. It is presented a proposal to associate the place names to still existing geographical objects. Furthermore some geographical names are discussed and interpreted in a new way in contrast to former explanations. Thus characteristic feature of the Nienburg fragment becomes obvious: The Latin written document has preserved the Slavonic proper names in a graphic variant very closely to their original forms without reduction or any other influence of the German language on it.

The article gives a review about perceptional processes of proper names and its results after decades of exploration in the field of Sorbian-German contacts in everyday speech in the Middle ages. The toponymic material belongs to the region between the rivers Saale and Elbe in the West and the rivers Queis, Bober, Oder in the East of the considered regions. Phenomena recognized of systematical evidence are described in detail, i. e. phonematical, graphematical, morphematical, lexical, and semantical facts are performed. Phases of onymic integration, transsumption and transposition are exemplified. The process of integration is illustrated by variants of onyms as well as by processes of adaptation. Special attention is mentioned to the borrowing events of German place names in Sorbian language since the Middle ages.