The article deals with the explanation of toponyms in the territory of Brandenburg, which was populated by Slavs approximately from the 6th to the 14th century. The place-names of Polabian origin in this territory could be derived also from appellatives denoting plants as there are trees (Buckow/beech-tree; Damme/oak- tree; Jabel/apple), bushs and shrubs (Leest/hazel; Kallinchen/elder; Friesack/heath), some kind of grasses (Ziethen/rush; Weisen/reed), berries (Preußnitz/cranberry), flowers (Wust/thistle; Löcknitz/water-lily) and last but not least mushrooms (Feldgrieben/mushroom; Schmarsow/morel). Approximatly 50 toponyms are derived in this way. This article can also give a contribution to the description of the flora of the territory of Brandenburg in earlier times.

Mein Untersuchungsgebiet umfasst das östlich der Lausitzer Neuße gelegene Territorium Schlesiens, das bis zum Jahr 1937 zu Deutschland gehörte, dazu noch das frühere Krossener Land und der Kreis Schwiebus/Swiebodzin, die einst ein Bestandteil Schlesiens waren. Ich berücksichtige auch die östlichen Teile der ehemaligen Kreise Guben/Gubin, Sorau/Zary und Zittau, die früher zu den Provinzen Mark Brandenburg bzw. Sachsen gehörten und heute dem polnischen Schlesien angegliedert sind.

People who leave their home, take their names with them. That is the reason why place names in new settlements can contain remembrances of the language spoken in the former home area. This essay will among others deal with the German emigration overseas; the German settlement in the East; the spreading of the East-Slavic settlement area; the occupation and settlement of England through Western Germanic tribes, and the home and dispersal of Germanic tribes. For this purpose, place names are important, maybe even the most important witnesses of migration.

Apart from the Germania of Tacitus, Jordanes´s History of the Goths is the preeminent source for Germanic history. Many opinions of nowadays scholars are based on his accounts. Of the utmost significance are the effects in the field of onomastics. In the end the idea developed by R. Much that the names of various Germanic tribes are nicknames can be tracked down to Jordanes´s explanation of the name Gepids. In a similar way modern scholarship took his narrative of the migrations of the Goths as a veracious description of remote realities in the past, Christensen's book unsettles the prevailing opinion of early Gothic history. This essay deals with the consequences of these findings on onomastics.

The documentation of names in large printed collections (in form of highly structured articles including the name's history, its etymology and variation etc.) has always been an important task of onomastic research. This paper presents a new, more effective way of publishing in onomastics, consisting of a combination of a database (AskSam 5) and a typesetting system (LaTeX). The input of the typesetting system is generated by an output program of the database. Some advantages of this solution are discussed: the independence of the data from the layout in the printed book, which allows to change the layout whenever needed (e.g. when combining different projects), and a higher data security by using basic ASCII code in the database combined with a markup language for professional typesetting. All corrections are made in the database. This keeps the database in accordance with the correct, finally printed text and opens new perspectives in using the data for additional projects, e.g. for indexes or other forms of publication (e.g. popular or short versions). All steps of this new approach are presented: the required features of the database, how to produce the printfile, and how to make the corrections. A detailed discussion of the advantages and the resulting savings of money and time aims to encourage the readers to follow our solution.

This article draws attention to the corpus of digitally stored street names. While it has become common practice to use a suitable telephone CD-ROM for the cartographic presentation and linguistic interpretation of family names, street names, in this respect, have been overlooked so far. Applying his own software the author presents 14 maps of different character to set an example for various possibilities of including street names into onomastic research. First and foremost, this particular class of names is suited to get a rough overview of historical, historico-cultural, lexical, phonological, structural and social or sociological facts. In some special cases, maps showing the distribution of street names can provide information that is not available in a different way. At any rate, the selection of street names to be processed for cartographic presentation and the maps themselves require careful interpretation.

Although the handbooks unanimously maintain that -gasse was the second element in compound medieval streetnames in the High German area of Southern and Central Germany, whereas -strate was the predominant second element in streetnames in the Low German area of Northern Germany, a closer look at Regensburg and Vienna documents surprisingly reveals that at least in these important South German cities -straße and not -gasse was the generic in the earliest German streetnames. It was only from the late 15th century onwards that -gasse began to replace -straße in Regensburg and Vienna. Later, in the 19th century, the word Gasse was connected with the idea of a narrow, unimportant street and therefore -gasse again made way for -straße, at least in Regensburg. An overview over the German-speaking area shows that in medieval documents -straße predominated along the river Danube, whereas in South-Western Germany and Switzerland as well as in Central Germany -gasse was favoured. The early appearance of -straße in Cologne and Leipzig is seen as the result of an influence of the more prestigious Low German -strate area.

The present scientific research examines the names of festal events (festivals, exhibitions, shows, contests, campaigns and etc) and their linguistic characteristics. Our purpose is to define the status of such names as proper names and to investigate the structural-semantic features of German and Russian names of festal events. In the course of this investigation we have come to the conclusion that the names are pinned down as a cause of the secondary artificial nomination. In general, the results of our analysis indicate that the identifying method of nomination proves to be the leading one. This fact can be explained by the specificity of the object of nomination, which is understood as an idea or concept underlying any festal event but not a definite object. To summarize the ideas, the choice of the nomination means (semantic, syntactical, word-forming and complex) is dependent not only upon the specific features of the object of nomination but upon the inbuilt potential of the language.

The paper presents a collection of proper names (first names and surnames), that was edited as a reprint from the Saxon Academy of Sciences (Leipzig). The now available names of the so called “Nienborger Atlas” contain more than 750 first names and surnames from homeowners of the city of Leipzig in the year 1712 and was not yet evaluated onomastically.

Danish family names seem to be easy to understand and interpret. The 50 most frequent Danish family names are carried by 70% of the Danish population, all of which end with the typical suffix –sen. Thus, other means than the family name are used to distinguish people carrying the same name, namely the first name and the middle name (e. g. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the name of the Danish Prime Minister). The history of laws concerning Danish family names is long, starting as early as 1526. Since then, six different laws were passed in 1828, 1857, 1898, 1904, 1961, and most recently, in 2005. All of these aimed at a diversification of the Danish name landscape. Today, every name that is carried by more than 2000 people, can be chosen by those who wish to change their family name. In the first year after the new law has been in force, 40000 Danes changed their family names and the authorities are expecting equally high numbers of applications for name changes in the coming years.