The name of the small town Merseburg, some 15 km south of the
city of Halle (Saale) has puzzled researchers for decades. Several solutions
have been proposed, but all of them were flawed with respect to phonology
and / or morphology and / or semantics. Here a new solution, first proposed by
Albrecht Greule in 2014 can be corroborated taking also the geological formations
of the surroundings of Merseburg into account. Greule connected
the first part of the compound name Merse- with names of lakes and islands
in Scandinavia. Together with a Swedish dialectal term for ‘heap of stones’
these names point to several terms with the structure Proto-Germ. *mVrs/zV-
‘(having) stone(s)/pebble(s)/rock(s)’ (originally ‘the crushed one’ vel sim.). North
of the city of Merseburg we find on the left bank of the river Saale – below
thick layers of mud, which might not be older then the Middle-Ages – an area
of about 500 × 3000 m characterized exactly by rock and pebbles. Thus Merseburg
might have been the ‘castle / town at the area with rocks / stones / pebbles’
– or, more pointedly: the ‘castle on the rocks’.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:17184 |
| Date | 15 February 2018 |
| Creators | Bichlmeier, Harald |
| Publisher | Deutsche Gesellschaft für Namenforschung (GfN), Universität Leipzig |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | German |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion, doc-type:article, info:eu-repo/semantics/article, doc-type:Text |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | urn:nbn:de:bsz:15-qucosa2-170739, qucosa:17073 |
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