L’article suivant se veut un médiateur entre la linguistique systémique fonction-nelle (LSF, SFL en anglais), très répandue dans la linguistique anglophone et la théorie linguistique d’Eugenio Coseriu, mieux connue dans les études des langues romanes. Les deux théories se basent, au moins en partie, sur les concepts saussu-riens de langue et parole. Coseriu y a découvert des lacunes laissant inexpliqués certains phénomènes langagiers. A partir de ces lacunes l’article explique pour-quoi Coseriu et Elisabeth Burr propagent la nécessité d’un troisième plan linguis-tique, celui de la norme. Continuant par la reformulation des points critiques de Burr, selon lesquelles le modèle linguistique de la LSF ne dispose d’une norme ni pourrait en disposer, on étudie comment la LSF gère les lacunes saussuriennes identifiées par Coseriu. A la base de certains concepts centraux de la LSF, dont les méta-fonctions, l’instanciation et le modèle du système linguistique, on vise à montrer que le modèle linguistique de la LSF a déjà partiellement intégré des con-cepts comparables à celui de la norme, mais que la LSF pourrait aussi profiter de certaines idées développées par Coseriu. / The following article aims at mediating between Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and the linguistic theory of Eugenio Coseriu, the former well established in English linguistics, the latter better known by linguists of Romance languages. Both theories are based at least partially on the Saussurean concepts of langue and parole. Within these concepts, Coseriu has discovered certain gaps leaving unex-plained several linguistic phenomena. Taking these gaps as a starting point, the article explains why Coseriu and Elisabeth Burr advocate the necessity of a third linguistic layer, the one of the norm. Continuing by some of Burr’s claims towards SFL, according to which its linguistic model does not and will not be able to con-tain the idea of a normative layer, the article asks how SFL treats the gaps identi-fied by Coseriu. On the basis of certain key concepts of SFL, like meta-functions, instantiation and the linguistic system, the article wants to show that SFL has par-tially integrated concepts comparable to the one of norm, but that it could benefit from some aspects of Coseriu’s linguistic theory anyway.

In his paper “ELF and the alternatives,” Ian MacKenzie considers a number of options that are presently under discussion as possible alternatives to the use of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). Their scope includes translation (a short section of two paragraphs only), code switching, receptive multilingualism, and Esperanto. It is the presentation of the latter approach that I want to address in this comment. As MacKenzie’s bibliography contains two articles of mine and as these seem to be important sources on which the author bases his argumentation, I suppose that I should react to his paper.

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Having emigrated from France to Russia, Charlotte Lemonnier has survived the cruelties of the Stalinist regime and the Second World War. Maintaining great serenity of soul, she lives freely among the inhabitants of a small village in Siberia, conveying to her grandson Alyosha a vivid image of the freedom available in France as well as a feel for the French language. The adolescent tries to reconcile Charlotte’s tales with the Russian mentality and the hardships of life in Russia, but fails in his aspirations, particularly in the domain of eroticism. He eventually emigrates to France, where he seeks to overcome Anthroponymes et toponymes dans Le testament français d’Andreï Makine 125 his disappointment by writing novels in French. Through Charlotte’s posthumous letter, Alyosha realizes that he was born in a gulag as the fruit of a coercive sexual relationship imposed on an imprisoned female kulak. The present study is based on the hypothesis that poetonyms contribute significantly to the constitution of the meaning of literary texts. Despite the centrality of literary names in Makine’s novel, however, its poetonyms have not yet been studied in any detail. I will therefore analyse symbolic, etymological, historic, geographic, anagrammatic aspects, etc. of the most important anthroponyms and toponyms that occur in this novel (Alyosha, Charlotte, Pashka, Félix Faure / Atlantide, Boyarsk, Saranza, Stalinka …). By combining the different names and placing them in their French and Russian linguistic contexts, I will show that there is a movement from one cultural background to the other. Thus, through name configuration in particular, Dreams of My Russian Summers portrays a multicultural migration between France and Russia – between East and West. Dreams of my Russian Summers is a Bildungsroman that encompasses several issues: identity formation (what shall I be: Russian, French, cosmopolitan?); sentimental education (love, what is it?); disappointment; and, finally, awareness of reality.]

In the German language, there are toponyms with initial elements that are largely similar or even completely identical in modern times. In this article, two names beginning with Schlett- from Central Germany are used to show that, in a Slavic-German contact zone, in certain cases the historically transmitted forms of toponyms do not reliably indicate their language of origin. This is due to the fact that the tradition begins late (14th century) and the phonetic syllables do not allow a clear differentiation with regard to primary suffixation or dialectally weakened case forms. In addition, the basic elements of the toponyms in the two source languages have two special features. First, they have a fairly identical structure: in both languages, they show the sequence of matching consonant phonemes, differing only in the vowel phoneme after the first two consonants. Second, the two lexemes underlying the formation of the name have a corresponding meaning in each of the two languages. For this reason, a number of facts derived from the history of settlement and rule and from church history and national history in the contact area are included in the article to clarify the original forms. The effort to verify their linguistic origin leads to the following result; in the case of one place in the language contact area, it must be assumed that two names temporarily existed which formed independently of each other and with an identical motivation and virtual homophony. In the case of the second place, an original form derived from a foreign language can be ruled out. Other toponyms with the element Schlett- from the Middle and Upper German-speaking areas are referred to for purposes of comparison and also as proof that other original forms could also lead to the present-day Schlett-.

Geographische Namen können als ‘verdichtete Erzählungen’ über das geographische Objekt, das sie bezeichnen, sowie über die namengebende Gemeinschaft betrachtet werden. In Richtung des Objekts gilt dies jedoch nur für deskriptive Namen, nicht für Gedenknamen wie Namen nach Personen oder Ereignissen oder für neutrale Namen wie Namen nach Blumen oder Tieren. Die Zuschreibung der Qualität ‘verdichteter Erzählungen’ beruht auf der Annahme, dass jeder Name mit Bedacht gewählt wurde und ein wesentliches oder auffallendes Merkmal eines Objekts hervorhebt. Allerdings kann dieses Merkmal heute nicht mehr so wichtig sein und ist die Bedeutung eines Namens auch nicht immer transparent, weil Namen oft aus früheren Sprachen oder älteren Schichten einer heute an einem Ort gesprochenen Sprache stammen. Für die heutige Geographie ist dieser Aspekt geographischer Namen deshalb besonders interessant, weil ihr heute vorherrschender konstruktivistischer Ansatz die menschliche Wahrnehmung der Umwelt, des geographischen Raumes und geographischer Objekte in den Mittelpunkt stellt und dafür geographische Namen eine wichtige Informationsquelle besonders über heute nicht mehr existierende Gesellschaften und ältere Schichten der Kulturlandschaft sind. Der Artikel illustriert diesen Gedanken anhand von Beispielen aus Mitteleuropa und dem adriatischen Raum.

In this paper I study the structural types of settlement names referring to the natural environment and highlight what kind of semantic and lexical- morphological models characterize the particular name structures and when and in what proportion they appeared in sources of the Old Hungarian Era. Among the basic name structural types of settlement names referring to the natural environment, more than half of the name corpus is made up by single-component settlement names without a formant (56 %, e. g. Kökényér < Kökény-ér hydronym ‘blackthorn/brook’, Alma < alma ‘apple’, etc.), while 34 % of the names were created as single-component toponyms with formants (e. g. Erdőd < erdő ‘forest’ + -d topoformant, Somogy < som ‘dogwood’ + -gy suffix, etc.); this means that the character of the name type is clearly defined by the single-component structure. Metonymic and morphemic name formation were used throughout the early Old Hungarian Era to create settlement names. The proportion of two-component settlement names referring to the natural environment is only 10 % (e. g. Szamosfalva ‘village/next to the River Szamos’, Structural Types of Settlement Names Referring to the Natural Environment Kecskéskér ‘Kér settlement/abounding in goats’, etc.). I could conclude that in the Hungarian toponymic system compared to single-component names, two-component settlement names reflecting natural features appeared in sources from the early Old Hungarian Era not only in a lower number but there are also differences in the chronology of single-component and two-component denominations.]

Places known for their prehistoric petroglyphs are often named after the carved images and symbols found there. Focusing on a corpus of 115 representative toponyms from the Spanish, Galician and Portuguese speaking areas, the present article explores the interaction between the lexical components of place names and the rock carvings to which they refer. This analysis allows us to distinguish between several types of name motivation and to explain the manner in which such enigmatic testimonies of past cultures were perceived and interpreted before they became the subject of scholarly research.

Als Arzt, Naturforscher und humanistischer Universalgelehrter befand sich der im 16. Jahrhundert in Zürich lebende Conrad Gessner (1516–1565) an vorderster Front des damaligen Wissens.1,2 Neben seiner Haupttätigkeit als Stadtarzt war er unter anderem auch als Botaniker, Zoologe, Tierarzt, Geograf, Theologe, Philosoph, Bibliograf und Linguist tätig. / A resident of 16th century Zurich, the versatile Swiss physician, naturalist and polymath Conrad Gessner (1516–1565) was at the forefront of the knowledge production of his time. Best known as a botanist and zoologist, his achievements in linguistics are also noteworthy. A major focus of Gessner’s work on languages was the study of the names of plants and animals, individuals, peoples and places. His writings contain hundreds of comments on and explanations of names. Many of them are to be found in the Onomasticon propriorum nominum (1544), in the Bibliotheca universalis (1545) and in the Mithridates (1555). Unfortunately, his work on German personal names, Germanica nomina propria, has been lost. Gessner follows ancient and medieval tradition when explaining names mainly by associating them with other words with a similar sound. As an avid compiler of existing knowledge, he adopts many etymological explanations from other authors. The selection of etymologies from Gessner’s work presented here shows that while he did not always have the right answers to his etymological questions (in fact, he often did not), he was asking the right kinds of questions - although his interpretation of names was limited by a lack of linguistic groundwork so that he was unable to go back far beyond ancient and medieval etymologists. His greatest achievements in this field are perhaps the realization of the importance of names for the comparative study of languages and a recognition of the need for any study of names to start from a comprehensive collection of the material. His work goes far beyond that of his predecessors in terms of his ambition to collect onomastic materials and to analyse them in detail, e.g. regarding compound names. As such, it helped to prepare the ground for what later became the scholarly study of names.

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