Straßennamen sind Symbole. Der Umgang mit ihnen zeigt an, in welche Traditionslinien sich ein Gemeinwesen stellen und woher es die historische Legitimation für die Politik holen will. Bedeutungsvoll und bezeichnend sind in diesem Zusammenhang die Straßenumbenennungen, die nach der Wende in der Ex-DDR eingeführt worden sind.

The study provides an outline in German language of the most important results of geographic name research in Hungary. Its main objective is to assist colleagues who have no information about research projects in Hungary because to date they have hardly been dealt with in summaries published in the main world languages (English, German, and French). Our study consists of eight chapters. The first deals with Hungarian publishing forums, onomastics congresses, the major sites of name databases as well as with research sites. The second discusses theoretical issues, while the fourth gives an outline of descriptive name studies. The fifth chapter provides an insight into the results of historical toponymy whereas the sixth and the seventh inform the reader about the application of research methods in respect of name geography and name sociology. The last, i.e. the eighth chapter imparts to the reader the domestic problems related to applied place name research.

Some statements about the relations between general lexicon and onomasticon, etymology and history of words and the question, how far a name must be traced back etymologically. The examples are chosen from romance languages and German.

The first sentence of Goethe's 'Elective Affinities' poses many questions: Who is meant by the personal pronoun 'we' that calls a young baron Eduard? And are we to rely on that unusual literary naming procedure that intentionally destroys all fictional illusions? Further on in the novel we are informed that it is actually not a mysterious 'we', but rather that the wealthy baron himself, whose 'real' name was Otto, had chosen this name. This essay tries to elucidate the motives and intentions underlying Goethe's ambiguous and capricious game which he plays with the reader's expectations.

There is a considerable public interest in the name-giving of top-ranking firms in the German economy. However, the world of business doesn't completely consist of, or depend on global players listed on the DAX index, on the contrary - to a large degree economic life is dependend on SMEs, small and medium sized enterprises. If we want to gain some insight into actual name-giving tendencies in German commerce and industry we ought to take a closer look at the diachronic development of company names. In this article account is given of such an analysis of names in the cooperative sector. Cooperative organisations allow to differentiate between several branches of the economy, and between varying sizes of companies, keeping at the same time the legal form of the enterprise invariable. As most important results of this inquiry we can conclude: Big companies directed strongly at interregional and international activities under strong competition make use of the most modern elements in their name-giving. They prefer elements such as abbreviations, deviations from orthographical norms, and fancy names/neologisms, and rather tend to avoid elements like owner names or geographical indications (like the seat of the company, or its sphere of action).

The first part of the paper is a presentation of a doctoral thesis Hispano-romanisches Namenbuch submitted at the University of Trier (to be published in 2009 in the series 'Patronymica Romanica' by Niemeyer, Tübingen). The thesis is dedicated to the personal names of pre-Roman, Greek and Latin-Romance etymology in the Christian North of the Iberian Peninsula in the medieval period (6th-12th centuries). Comments on primary sources and structure are followed by a sample article (*Aurundo) from the thesaurus. In the second part of the paper a particular aspect of the Ibero-Romance onomasticon, which is its multicultural etymolo- gical composition, is discussed. Examples of medieval and modern personal names typical for each etymological layer (pre-Roman, Latin, Hebrew, Visigothic, Arabic, Franconian, Gallo-Romance) conclude the survey.

The first stratum of Spanish surnames in Germany goes back to Spanish soldiers fighting on German soil during the wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, the second one to Jewish immigrants of Spanish (and Portuguese) origin, who settled down in Northern Germany around 1600, and the third one to workers' immigration and exile in the second half of the 20th century. Special attention is given to the last stratum (problems connected with the use of telephone directories as a source, frequent Spanish surnames in present Germany, tendencies of linguistic integration).

The article illustrates 'nomination” as a special form of reference, containing an evaluative perspective of the language user on extra-linguistic entities (cf. REISIGL 2003. In the media discourse nomination referring to people appears as classification or as anthroponyms and can be instrumentalized. The corpus consists of the nominations of the candidates to the presidential election in France 2007, the nominations contained in the daily press of the 3 months preceding the election. In the field of nomination as anthroponyms it could be shown that in the media discourse the use of the family name alone and the use of both first name and family name can be considered as neutral, while the use of a nickname or the first name alone establishes a relation of inferiority, a phenomenon that could be observed only in the case of the female candidate Ségolène Royal. Nomination as classification of the other hand established the following representations: The hyper real figure of Nicolas Sarkozy was represented as an authoritarian, strong, experienced politician with a problematic character and a migration-background. Ségolène Royal was constructed as an emotional woman who is hardly known in the political landscape and has little political experience. François Bayrou was represented as a solid, Christian down-to-earth personality, at the third place behind the other two and Jean Marie Le Pen as extreme right wing and the oldest candidate behind the other three. It could be shown that nominations (as classifications or anthroponyms) construct representations of the candidates which correspond even before the elections to their result.

The article gives a survey about a new manual to the Celtic languages in Western Europe. Its author is the German linguist Herbert PILCH (university of Freiburg). As a book of reference the title is especially recommended to students of Onomastics as well as to readers with interests in Celtic names or names of Celtic origin in other languages. It stands in sharp contrast to a pseudo-scientific tendency of explaining anthroponyms and toponyms in Eastern Germany with the help of “Celtic roots' based on an old obsolete publication with a large following in recent times. The main argument there is the statement German people spoke Celtic based dialects up to the Middle Ages and thus all names have only been horribly bent by adapting to the modern German language. The book Die keltischen Sprachen und Literaturen is therefore of especial importance to refute unscientific opinions and intentions.

The article aims at demonstrating problems in connection with the process of reconstructing Old-Sorbian place names in the area of Upper and Lower Lusatia. On the basis of two books published in 2006 and 2008 by the well known onomast Walter WENZEL (Leipzig) and a critical contribution by the Sorbian linguist and specialist in etymologies Heinz Schuster- Šewc(Bautzen/Budysin) several important and necessary points of view regarding the past of more than thousand years in the tradition of place names are described and discussed.