The project 'Archiv für die Gewässernamen Deutschlands und Europas' established on the 'Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz' since 1960, has ended definitivly in 2005. On this occasion the author discusses first, what the research on hydronyms in the middle of Europe has achieved in the last forty years, and secondly, what is to do in the future. Finally he recommends the foundation of a Centre for Onomastics in Germany as a partner of the other Centres of Onomastics in Europe, resident in the Academies or the Universities.

The author presents dictionaries of toponyms from the Slavic-German borderland. The conceptions of German, Czech and Polish dictionaries are presented. He considers the method of toponym-settlement identification better and more transparent than the method of establishing one entry and common linguistic explanation for names of varied origin. The author emphasizes the necessity for research of related names from the various Slavic languages.

The name of a small town in Eastern Thuringia is discussed here. It is a very difficult name and it is surely not of German origin. Historical documents have shown the name to be almost without any varieties since the Middle Ages. Discussing several Old Sorbian etymological interpretations it gets evident that only one explanation can be accepted with regard to the structure of the name, with regard to similar names in Slavonic languages, and due to the results of Slavonic-German language-contacts.

This Article deals with geonames in the Czech Republic, i.e. the former Bohemian crown lands of Bohemia, Moravia, and parts of Silesia. The main focus of investigation are place names related to trees and other plants, forests and clearings. In particular, names derived from the beech tree (tagus silvaticus) are analyzed with regard to postglacial vegetational history, hypsometrlc biogeocenosis, history of settlement, and linguistic patterns. 84 place names derived from the beech tree have been verified at an average altitude of 425 m.

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.