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Noch einmal zum Ortsnamen Magdeburg / Once more about the place name Magdeburg

During the last decade Prof. Udolph has published a series of at least five articles, in which he argued that the until then unanimously accepted etymology of the place-name Magdeburg ‘City of (the) Virgin(s)’ must be wrong. In these articles he also refuted the less widely known etymology that argues for Magdeburg to be the ‘City of camomilla’. Comparing this and other place-names containing the element Magde‑, Magade‑ vel sim. to others containing the first member Mikil‑, Michel‑ etc. ‘big, great’ he reached the conclusion that Magde‑, Magade‑ etc. should be an adjective meaning something like ‘great, mighty ’ as well. His morphological and phonological arguments for doing so are here refuted by showing that neither is the prototype for his proposed adjective Germ. *magaþ‑, Germ. *nakuađ‑ ‘naked’, etymologically sufficiently clear, nor is there any other way to produce the required word-structure either by Germanic or by Indo-European means of word-formation. Though the author of this article is also not very glad about the older explanations, they have the advantage of simply being morphologically and phonologically flawless.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa.de:bsz:15-qucosa-145520
Date20 August 2014
CreatorsBichlmeier , Harald
ContributorsUniversität Leipzig , Philologische Fakultät, Gesellschaft für Namenkunde e.V. ,, Universität Leipzig , Philologische Fakultät, Gesellschaft für Namenkunde e.V. ,
PublisherUniversitätsbibliothek Leipzig
Source SetsHochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden
Languagedeu
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typedoc-type:article
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceNamenkundliche Informationen; 97(2010), S. 109-132

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