In comparison with personal names toponyms have been rather neglected in studies on literary onomastics. Place names may seem less promising for onomastic research because authors tend to anchor their narratives in the actual world much more than characters. However, place names in literature fulfil important tasks: they mainly contribute to the fictional constitution of space. The question whether the actual counterparts of fictional place names are of any importance for the reader has been discussed very controversially. But place names may also help to create a certain mood or local colour. They even may indicate the passing of time. As all these phenomena are based on mental processes which take place in the reader’s brain this paper tries to study them with the help of actual cognitive science.

Anfang Juli 2012 haben wir auf dem Südfriedhof in Leipzig von Ernst Eichler fur immer Abschied nehmen müssen. Ganz in der Nähe von August Leskien und Wilhelm Streitberg hat er seine letzte Ruhestätte gefunden. Mit Ernst Eichler ist ein Genius der historischen Sprachforschung von uns gegangen. Fur den Wissenschaftsfächer von Akademie und Universität in Leipzig ist das ein grosser und schlimmer Verlust. Der Wissenschaftler Ernst Eichler hat zu seinen Lebzeiten viele Anerkennungen, Würdigungen und Auszeichnungen für sein bewundernswert breites Lebenswerk in der Sprachforschung erfahren. Seine Leistungen und Verdienste sind in Zeitschriften, Festschriften und Sammelbänden in ihrer Vorbildbedeutung dargestellt worden. Sie sind auch in unserer Fachzeitschrift zur Onomastik zuletzt zu seinem 80. Geburtstag in einer von mir gegebenen Würdigung nachlesbar. Es muss daher heute nichts wiederholt werden, was wohl den meisten in guter Erinnerung ist.

Dieser Artikel beschreibt einen neuen angewandten epistemologischen Aspekt der sogenannten Konvergenztheorie, die eine Homogenisierung der unterschiedlichen Ansätze auf dem Gebiet der indoeuropäischen Linguistik anstrebt. Es wird versucht, anhand von Ortsnamen in Verbindung mit der Wurzel *alb- und den semantischen Bedeutungsverschiebungen über Jahrhunderte ein europäisches und italienisches "Makro-Gebiet" (bzw. "Mikro- Gebiet") zu rekonstruieren. Es scheint, dass Paleo-Ligurische Ortsnamen wie Alba, alteuropäische Flussnamen wie Albis und ihre ablautenden Formen Olb- (> Orb- im Romanisch-Ligurischen) nicht direkt auf das Proto-Indoeuropäische Adjektiv *albho-, ‘weiß’ zurückgehen, sondern auf die weitere Prä-proto-Indoeuropäische Wurzel *Hal-bh-, ‘Wasser’, verwandt mit dem Sumerischen ḫalbia (> Akkadisch ḫalpium, ‘Quelle’, ‘Brunnen’, ‘Wassermassen’, ‘Wasserloch’). Eine weitere Analyse von *Hal-bh- führt zum Vergleich mit der Proto-Indoeuropäischen Wurzel *Hal-, ‘ernähren’. Das Proto-Indoeuropäische Suffix *HwaH-r-, ‘Wasser’, weist eine ähnliche Verbreitung auf.

In 2012, Namn och bygd, which is considered to be the world’s oldest specialised journal for place-name research, is publishing its one-hundredth issue. In this essay, the author attempts a survey of key aspects of the journal, and changes affecting it, since 1913. This includes comments on its aims, its editors and associate editors, contributing authors from different academic disciplines, contacts with other countries within and beyond the Nordic region, different sections of the journal and, of course, the scholarly content of Namn och bygd over the hundred years of its history.

This paper deals with place names ending in -leben which contain a single stem personal name as modifier with strong declension. A typological analysis shows both the distribution of name elements and regional differences between the main distribution areas Bode- and Unstrutkreis. This subtye of -leben names dominates in the Bodekreis but is less representative in the Unstrutkreis. The analysis is completed with a map.

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.

Seit Jahren steige ich am Magdeburger Hauptbahnhof ein und aus. Wenn dann die Ansage kommt, man sei in Magdeburg, kann man immer wieder bei einigen Fahrgästen ein ironisches Grinsen erkennen. Warum? Nun, in dem bei der Deutschen Bahn offenbar zentral erstellten Ansagetext wird Magdeburg mit langem -a- gesprochen, so wie auch das Wort Magd im Allgemeinen im Hochdeutschen artikuliert wird. Dieses kleine Beispiel ist für die Frage nach der Herkunft und Bedeutung des Ortsnamens Magdeburg von einiger Bedeutung, zeigt es doch, dass der Ortsname natürlich mit dem Wort Magd in Verbindung gebracht wird. Man spricht in derartigen Fällen bekanntlich von volksetymologischen Umdeutungen oder – vor allem in der Leipziger Onomastik – von (scheinbarer) sekundärer semantischer Motivierung. Im Fall von Magdeburg ist die Annahme, es liege das Wort Magd zugrunde, in fast einmaliger Weise seit Jahrhunderten nachgewiesen.

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.