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.

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.

When analysing the etymological layers of Hungarian river names, it becomes soon clear that loan names make up a much larger group than in the group of settlement names, for instance. This fact can be due to the phenomenon that in the case of hydronyms, name-giving and name-usage is driven mainly by communicative needs, while other (e. g. socio-cultural or political) factors only rarely influence name-giving. In my paper, it was my aim to provide an etymological typology of Hungarian hydronyms from the Árpád-era (896 –1350). It seems to be justified to choose the Hungarian hydronyms of the Árpád-era as the corpus of my investigation, for the country was strongly multilingual and multiethnic in this period of time (Hungarian, Slavic, German, Turkish), which also has an effect on the system of water names. The survey of the linguistic layers of river names shows that largely the same semantic content appears in river names originating from different languages. The semantic types appearing in river names belong to the so-called panchronistic feature of the hydronym system, in other words, they show signs of universal human thinking.

During the last decades a big gap has opened between onomastics on the one side and Indo-European linguistics on the other, because the progresses made in Indo-European linguistics have not been integrated into the study of onomastics any longer in a sufficient way. The article tries to close this gap by giving an outline of some of the main features of modern Indo-European linguistics. Those features are then used to reexamine the etymologies of several presumably rather old river-names and of one of the Indo-European words for "water". This sometimes leads to a reevaluation of existing etymologies. The author hopes that this article might be seen as an incentive for researchers in onomastics to care more about the findings of Indo-European linguistics again.