1026
Namen im Sprachkontakt
159. Names in Language Contact: Foreign Placenames
1. Introduction
2. Toponyms from Nouns and Names
3. Linguistic Nativization
4. Historical Implications
5. Semantic Aspects
6. Selected Bibliography
1. Introduction
Placenames based on foreign languages are every-
where, and they are significant and varied enough
to warrant a treatment of their own. The problems
involved will be indicated under the four headings
indicated, 2—5.
2. Toponyms from Nouns and Names
The foreignness of foreign names has various
sources. Quite commonly, placenames are
based on “appellatives”, common nouns, of
foreign provenance, i. e., on loanwords. These
usually reflect aspects of the natural and so-
cial environment behind the language of their
origin. Or foreign placenames may derive
from foreign personal names, which often
indicate the settler of or dweller in the place.
Or places may perpetuate the names of for-
eign institutions, ecclesiastic or governmental,
and such names tend to be a blend of appel-
latives and personal names. We exemplify
these three kinds of placenames with German
toponyms of French origin (Bach 1954, II:2,
§§ 53 6, 53 4, 519). Appellatives: Fr. goutte
‘drop’, dial. ‘brook’ (FEW IV, 3 50 f.) was
used in Alsatian German as -gott, suffixed as
a marker of the environment to names of
brooks such as Hitzengott/Meisengott. —
Personal names: The township called Picardie
(in Einsland) was built up, in the 17th century,
by a preacher named Jan Picard. — Complex
names: A health resort in Lower Saxony is
called Pyrmont. The name, originally that of
a mountain fortress built by the Archbishop
of Cologne, goes back to Fr. Pyrremont
(1185), which itself is based on Petri mons.
Foreign appellatives as the bases of place-
names raise a problem of definition: their
degree of “foreignness”. A loanword, after a
certain stretch of time, may loose its foreign-
ness, in part through phonological adapta-
tion, in part through its common use in the
vernacular. Its foreignness may stimulate
historical interpretation, meaningful for the
etymologist, meaningless for the speaker.
IX.
And the same holds for toponyms based on
such appellatives. To Bach (1954, § 440), Ger-
man appellatives of Latin provenance, which
have turned into placenames, are “altes
Fremdgut”, foreignisms of long standing; but
the names, to him, are German. Examples
from West Germany: Lat. camminus ‘road’
→ Kimm; Lat. palatium ‘palace’ → Pfalz.
Georgacas (1949/50, 157) exemplifies the case
with two common Greek toponyms, Πόρτα
Pórta and ΣπίτιSpíti. The former < Lat.
porta ‘door’, the latter < Lat. hospitium
‘house’, but by today πόρτα and σπίτι are just
Greek lexemes.
Another recurrent problem tied to foreign
appellatives regards the process of naming.
Sometimes, it seems, this process starts with
the foreigners, who use appellatives of their
own language, familiar to them from their
former environment — and the names stick
and are adopted by the natives. Georgacas
(1949/50, 153 —155) discusses Greek place-
names based on appellatives from this angle:
these appellatives frequently did not become
current loanwords in Greek, but were used
directly as placenames by the Italians. Geor-
gacas (using the materials found in Kahane
1940) lists about one hundred of them. The
following examples are typical: nature: Σέρβα
Sérba, placename (but not an appellative) on
Chios, < Ital. selva ‘wood’; urban develop-
ment: ΠιατσέταPiatséta ‘name of the town
square in Argostoli (Cephalonia)’ < Ven. pi-
azzeta ‘small square’ (not an appellative in
the regional dialect); the harbor: Σκαλέτα
Skaléta ‘place near the coast, on Crete’ <
Ital. scaletta ‘small wharf’; religion: Αλτάρε
Altáre ‘place on the island of Kea’, once the
site of a Catholic church < Ital. altare ‘altar’.
Sachs (193 2, 7), in his analysis of medieval
Germanic toponyms in Spain and Portugal,
relates the placenames derived from appella-
tives to the settler. Only few Germanic ap-
pellatives were taken over and these were a
natural material for placenames: they referred
to the “dwelling” of the settler: *laubja ‘shel-
ter’, in the Galician dialect lobio, > place-
name Lobio, and bûr ‘house’ > Bouro, in
Oviedo. Longnon (1920—29, 211—222) lists
several French placenames based on Frankish
appellatives that pertain to the usual vocab-
ulary of nature and social life. Thus, Frank.
strôm ‘river’ yielded names such as Étrun
(Depts. Nord and Pas-de-Calais), and Frank.
159.  Names in Language Contact: Foreign Placenames
fara ‘clan’ rendered the toponym Fère (Depts.
Aisne and Marne). The fact that these appel-
latives have left no corresponding traces in
the spoken language (FEW 17, 262 s. v.
*strôm, and 15, 112 s. v. *fara) supports the
hypothesis that the names were given by the
foreigners themselves.
Placenames derived from personal names
must frequently have come into being
through a dweller’s personal link to local con-
ditions. Piel (193 3 , 109), analyzing over 1400
Portuguese placenames of Germanic origin,
states that in the North of the country and
in Galicia, i. e., in the area invaded by the
Suevi, these names, typically consisting of a
generic term such as Villa ‘village’ or Quinta
‘farm, property’ followed by a Gmc. name
such as Alvarim, were, “with no exception”,
based on person names. The name of the
settler turned into the name of the settlement.
Two types of such placenames are well rep-
resented in Greece, and they reflect local as-
pects of the intensive and longlasting impact
of “Venetocracy”, the supremacy of Venice in
the Eastern Mediterranean (Kahane 1940,
266—328). (a) First names: Ceph. Πιεροβούνι
Pieroboúni, a mountain on the island, < Ven.
Piero ‘Peter’ + Grk. βουνόbounó ‘mountain’;
Melos ΚουραδῆK ouradê, name of a location
with remnants of ancient walls and tombs, <
Ven. Corradin. (b) Family names: Crete Φα-
λαιριανάFalairianá n. plur., village (16—
17th c.), < Ven. FN Falier + suff.; Ceph.
ΛουρδᾶςLourdâs < Loredan, Venetian noble
family, whose members were high officials in
the Ionian Islands; Andros Μακροτάνταλο
Makrotántalo, ‘village’ < Ven. Marco Dan-
dolo; the village was possibly a fief of a rel-
ative of the first ruler of Andros, Marino
Dandolo(13th c.).
Placenames reflecting local events and con-
ditions that involve foreigners are well rep-
resented among the Norman toponyms in
England. Matthews (1972, 102—103 ) de-
scribes their genesis, “Complete placenames
of Norman origin are not common in Eng-
land, but when we turn to the double names
we find that the second part is often a Nor-
man contribution.” This “second part” was
frequently the surname of the Norman fam-
ilies which held the manor in the twelfth or
thirteenth century: Melton (Middletown) be-
came Melton Mowbray; Shepton (Sheeptown),
Shepton Mallet; Wootton (Woodtown), Woot-
ton Bassett.
Sometimes the foreignness of a placename
is indicated by the suffix: the suffix -ing, de-
noting a preceding name as that of the “oc-
1027
cupant,” implies Germanic provenance of the
toponym. Longnon (1920—29, 217—22) cites
examples of Frankish toponyms in France
marked by that suffix: Gazeran (Seine-et-
Oise) from Wasiringus, Thieffrain (Aube)
from Tendefridus, Bettange (Lorraine) from
Bertadius.
3. Linguistic Nativization
Foreignisms by turning toponyms frequently
loose their foreignness, and this process of
their “nativization” has various facets. A few
of these will be briefly described: phonological
adaptation, translation, and embedding in a
phrase.
3.1.  Phonological adaptation. Names that
were current in an area are taken over by the
new settlers and are adapted to their lan-
guage. The medieval Tyroleans expanding to
the South established themselves in Südtirol,
the Alpine region of northern Italy. They had
reached a land of Romance placenames, often
documented in Latin, and they Germanized
many of them: Lat. and Ital. fascia ‘strip of
a field’, used as toponym (13 92), was Tyrol-
ized → Pfätsch (1417), Lat. torculum ‘wine-
press’ → Torkel, name of farms (1288), Lat.
pratum ‘meadow’, plur. prata, with toponyms
such as Prada/Prade (1328)/Prais (= in
pratis → Bratz (Schneller 1896, 17, 26, 49).
In the same area, the Alto Adige, Battisti
(1963 , 54) observed the Tyrolization of evi-
dently Ital. placenames: Vallunga (‘long val-
ley’) → Flum and Vallaccia (‘bad valley’) →
Flatsch. The French of the Normans brought
into England was likewise “vulnerable” (Mat-
thews 1972, 99—100): A Norman, building
himself a castle on a high hill, called it Mont
hault, which became Mold; a northern abbey
was given the name of Haut emprise ‘high
endeavour’, which exists today as Haltem-
prise. In a more recent case, in the midland
country of the U. S., first explored and settled
by the French, some of the French names,
such as Detroit, Racine, and Baton Rouge,
were kept by the Americans; others, particu-
larly names of smaller places, were Angli-
cized: Terre Bleue ‘blue earth’ → Tar Blue;
Pomme de Terre ‘earth apple’ → Pomly Tar;
Mauvaise Terre ‘bad earth’ → Movestar
(Stewart 1982, 210—211).
3.2.  Translation. In England, the French ap-
pellatives imported by the Normans and re-
1028
ferring to features of landscape and environ-
ment, turned only rarely into placenames.
Yet, often they were added redundantly to
English toponyms (Matthews 1972, 104):
River Avon, with the latter lexeme being the
Welsh word for the former; Sherwood Forest,
with forest being the French word for ‘wood’;
Lake Windermere, with mere Anglo-Saxon for
‘body of water’; Burgh Castle, with the Ger-
manic and the French synonyms side by side.
3.3.  Embedding. Among foreign placenames,
a specific structure, that of head plus modi-
fier, has often been transferred from one lan-
guage to the other. In a study on the expres-
sion of “landmarks”, conspicuous objects on
land serving as guides to sailors and wander-
ers, we noticed (Kahane 1971, 255—256) that
certain objects possess two features that stim-
ulate naming and, accordingly, get binomial
names, usually consisting of noun and mod-
ifier. Examples from Italian placenames in
Greece: Corfu Πόρτα ριάλαPórta riála ‘a
square (near to the 16th-century city gate)’
< Porta reale ‘royal gate’. — Laconia Πόρτο
ΚάγιοPórto K ágio ‘open bay in Eastern
Maine (Peloponn.)’ < Ital. porto ‘harbour’
and Ven. quagia ‘quail’, so called as the last
European resting point of quails flying from
Europe to Crete and the Cyrenaica. — Leucas
Στρέτι κανάλι Stréti kanáli < canali stretti
‘narrow channels’; the transfer of the Ital.
canali masc. plur. was promoted by the Grk.
Latinism κανάλι kanáli n. sing. ‘channel’
(4th c.). — Pholegandros ΤαλιαγράνταTali-
agránta ‘a row of offshore rocks’ < Ital.
taglia grande ‘tally of large size’.
4. Historical Implications
The insight formulated by the Italian ety-
mologist Carlo Battisti (1963 , 3 8) is certainly
true of placenames: “The linguist cannot
avoid associating with the historian.” And
indeed, a basic approach to foreign toponyms
aims at historical inferences. Placenames
deemed foreign in a given language may have
existed somewhere before the speakers of that
language settled in the area of their use and
heard and adopted them. These names rep-
resent the substratum, the linguistic “under-
layer,” of such language. Or foreign names
may come into use as part of the linguistic
impact, whenever it took place, of a contem-
porary and, for that time, “modern” foreign
civilization, dominant in political, social, ec-
onomic or cultural respects. This impact is
IX. Namen im Sprachkontakt
labelled superstratum, the linguistic “over-
layer.” In short, the foreignness of a name,
whether the name belongs to the substratum
or the superstratum, is a historical and ety-
mological piece of evidence.
The history of Italy as reflected in its
placenames exemplifies these two patterns of
foreignness. Rohlfs (1944) provides a good
survey. As to Northern Italy, various topo-
nyms represent the substratum, scraps of a
language that were current in Latin before it
turned into Italian. Thus, the Alpine Monte
Rosa implies a pre-Indo-European term *rosa
‘glacier’, hinting at the presence of an early
non-identifiable population. The name of the
pre-Roman Ligurian tribe of the Taurini sur-
vives in the name of the city, Torino. The
Gaulish root morpheme nant ‘brook’ reap-
pears in Piedmont as Nant, the name of
brooks and places. In Tuscany, the form of
names likes Félsina and Sávena, which con-
tain three syllables and carry the stress on the
third from the end, suggest Etruscan origin.
Latinity with its development into Italian
turned into “the” language of the country —
yet, it was a country that attracted invaders
and settlers, whose languages in varying de-
grees represented the superstratum. In the
early Middle Ages, Germanic tribes, carried
by the völkerwanderung, established them-
selves in Italy. The name of the Langobards
survives in the medieval name of Italy, Lan-
gobardia, and the very Langobard lexeme fâra
‘clan’ appears in many North-Italian topo-
nyms such as Fâra Vicentina (‘of Vicenza’).
Similarly, the name of the Goths is preserved
in various names of former Gothic settle-
ments in Northern Italy: Gôdia in Friuli, Gôd-
ega in the province Treviso. The south of
Italy, from Antiquity through Byzantine
times, was Greek colonial territory, the
Magna Graecia, “Greater Greece”, and Greek
toponyms abound, exemplified, first of all, by
Napoli, which renders Grk. ΝεάπολιςNeápolis
‘Newtown’, and by the name of a small island
close to Naples, Nisida, which copies Grk.
νησίδαnēsída ‘small island’. This glimpse at
the various substratum and superstratum rel-
ics in Italian, stated in terms of their geo-
graphical distribution, followed (as men-
tioned) a survey of Rohlfs. He was a linguistic
geographer who linked the history of linguis-
tic phenomena to their geographical distri-
bution. The distribution of foreign place-
names is of equal significance for the recon-
struction of superstratum and substratum. It
reflects the spread of the foreign impact:
159.  Names in Language Contact: Foreign Placenames
Where the foreign placenames are most
crowded, there foreign influence was most
sustained. The case of the many Italian place-
names in Greece is an example: Four fifths
of these placenames are found in six areas,
all of which are located on islands or coasts:
the Ionian Islands; Crete; the Cyclades (the
islands in the S. Aegean); the Southern Spor-
ades and Cyprus; the great islands near Asia
Minor — Samos, Chios and Lesbos; and the
Southern Peloponnesus. These were the areas
under the administration of the Venetians, the
domination of the Genoese and the rule of
the Knights Hospitallers.
In, significantly, a handbook for historians,
Lebel 1961 outlines the history of France in
terms of French toponyms, phase by phase.
The Celtic layer: Their zeal of independence
and rivalry among themselves explains the
establishment, by the Gallic tribes, of numer-
ous fortified places, whose location is indi-
cated by the Celtic rootmorphemes dunum/
briga/durum, often differentiated by modifi-
ers: Augustodunum ‘fort of Augustus’, modern
Autun (Saône-et-Loire); Scaldobriga ‘fort of
the Scheldt’, modern Escaudoeuvres (Nord);
Brivodurum ‘fort on the bridge’, modern
Brières (Ardennes). The Latin layer: The ex-
pansion of the highway net built by the Ro-
mans is reflected in the stations which served
as shelters: Tabernae ‘taverns’ surviving in
Saverne (Bas-Rhin) and Taverne (Var), Man-
siones ‘dwelling places’, today Maisons at var-
ious localities. The Germanic layer: Germanic
farms were named by the generic noun for
‘farm’ in Romance, preceded by the Germanic
owner’s Latinized name in the genitive: Ar-
naldi villa, modern Arnaville (Meurthe-et-Mo-
selle); Gunderici corte, modern Guindrecourt
(Haute-Marne).
And then a similar example, from later
times, of placenames which reflect the transfer
of the typical features of a dominant culture
into a “colonial” area: As the French-Cana-
dian writer Gabrielle Roy (1962) proudly re-
ports, La Vérendrye (1685—1749), the ex-
plorer of Canada, left all over Manitoba
names which still evoke the pénétration fran-
çaise. Significantly, some of these names were
based on those of the forts built, in the thirties
of the eighteenth century, by the French: Fort
Rouge, today a district of Winnipeg; Fort-
Saint Charles, the oldest, on the Lake of the
Woods; the fort Maurepas, at the mouth of
the river Winnipeg.
Zgusta 1984 reconstructs the complex lin-
guistic history of Asia Minor through an anal-
1029
ysis of its placenames. The “indigenous” lan-
guages, such as Hittite and Phrygian, are
gone, but the placenames which they left be-
hind survived in the succeeding non-indige-
nous languages of the area, such as Greek,
Celtic and Turkish. Toponyms from, e. g., Ga-
latia (the area around Ankara) such as Μνί-
ζοςMnízos and Οὐήτισσον Ouḗtisson (as they
appear in the Greek documentation) are of
Lycian origin; K ívva K ínna and Manegordus
are Phrygian. Turk. Arguvan continues Cap-
padocian ἈργαοῦνArgaoûn, of Hittite origin.
Turk. Yörme evolves as identical with Byz.
ΓερμίαGermίa in Galatia, an originally Celtic
name.
The genesis of a superstratum evolved in
the naming process that played a weighty role
in the early expeditions of the Spaniards into
the New World. Ponce de León and his cap-
tains, in their cruises through the Caribbean,
felt obliged to give and to record names in a
newly discovered land. “The King himself
instructed some of them in their commissions:
‘You must give a name ... to cities, towns and
places which you find there.’ For the discov-
erer a province without a name was hardly a
province at all” (Stewart 1981, 12). The origin
of some of the names is documented (Stewart
11—16): The time of the year at which the
explorers reached what they believed was an
island, was around Easter, the feast of Res-
urrection, and Ponce de León, taking the
green land for a flowery land, and combining
the day of his discovery with the vegetation
of the place, called the supposed island Flor-
ida. Some of the names reflect no more than
the pilots’ first observations: A cape marked
by a dense growth of canes they called Cañ-
averal ‘canbrake’, and it still carries that
name. Or an incident motivated the naming:
On a small island Juan Ponce’s men caught
one hundred and seventy turtles, and they
called the island Tortugas ‘turtles’, a name
that still survives.
5. Semantic Aspects
The foreign toponyms of an area, seen in their
totality, convey a complex meaning: they re-
flect both the “foreign” civilization which,
during a certain period was providing these
names, and the “native” civilization which
was receiving them. The wealth of the Italo-
Venetian placenames in Greece illustrates well
this impact of a prestige language on topo-
nyms. From the thirteenth century on, Italy
played a dominant role in the Levant; from
1030
the fifteenth to the eighteenth century Venice
ruled over a colonial empire in the Aegean
and Ionian islands, the first colonial empire
of modern history. The impact on the lan-
guage of the natives was the typical impact
of a prestige language: the foreignisms entered
at the upper stratum of society, trickled down
to the level of the vernacular, and disappeared
early in the 20th century, as did also many of
the Italian placenames, under the pressure of
the times. The Italian toponyms in Greece
based on Ital. appellatives, which were often
given by the Greeks and adapted to Greek,
have to be understood as part of a prestige
language, that transmitted a vocabulary of
progress and modernism. These toponyms re-
flected those manifold areas of activity in
which the foreigners were in contact with the
natives: navigation and administration, set-
tling and building (Kahane 1940, 3 5—3 6): a)
Navigation: maistro (Ven.) ‘northwest wind’
→ ΜαΐστροςMa stros ‘cape to the northwest
of the island of Paros’. — scogio (Ven.) ‘cliff’
→ ΣκόγιαSkógia plur. ‘rocks and impassable
shorelines on the island of Chios’. — fregada
(Ven.) ‘frigate’ → ΦεργάδαPhergáda ‘a rock
in the South of the island of Samothrace’. —
b) Ven. administration: cancelaria (Ven.)
‘chancery’ → ΚαντζελαρίαK antzelaría ‘loca-
tion on Spetsai, an island off E. Peloponne-
sus, called after a house in which the munic-
ipal council of elders used to meet. — feudo
(Ven.) ‘fief’ → Φέουδο Phéoudo ‘large estate
in Andros’; the placename reflects a charac-
teristic feature of Frankocracy, the feudal sys-
tem; early in this century, the appellative
ϕέουδο phéoudo ‘large estate, desolate estate’
was still in use on the Ionian and Aegean
islands. — sanità (Ven.) ‘public health au-
thority’ → Syros ΣανιτάSanitá ‘a small port
in the bay of Hermoupolis’. c) The township:
marcà (Ven.) ‘market’ → Corfu ΜαρκᾶςMar-
kâs ‘the meat- and fishmarket’. — piazza
(OVen.) ‘square, market’ → ΠλάτσαPlátsa,
wide-spread as the name of town squares and
neighborhoods. — salizada (Ven.) ‘paved
road’ → Zante ΣαλιτζάδαSalitzáda ‘name of
the road leading to the castle’.
The semantic field of animal names, “zoo-
nyms”, is well represented among placenames
that are tied to Greek islands and coasts, and
early records of some of these names ap-
peared, not by chance, in the Greek “porto-
lani” of the sixteenth century, the guidebooks
for captains and pilots. Places, in other words,
were named by seamen passing by in their
vessels and translating first impressions into
IX. Namen im Sprachkontakt
toponyms. Among them (Cortelazzo 1986):
ΑζενέραAzenéra, a small island in the Hep-
tanesos, < Ven. asenera ‘place full of asses’;
ΦαλκονέραPhalkonéra, an island in the Ae-
gean Sea’, < Ven. falconera ‘place with fal-
cons’; νησί τῶν Περνίζωνnēsí tôn Pernízōn
‘island of the partridges’, near Crete, < Ven.
pernise ‘partridge’.
The most flexible semantic field, ideology,
tends to be expressed by the most flexible
kind of names, street names. Kramer 1985
describes the case of Cologne in the context
of the French Revolution. The French occu-
pied — and Frenchified — the German coun-
try west of the Rhine, and the city turned to
the last German Rektor of the University, a
loyal adherent of the Napoleonic reorienta-
tion of Europe, to attend to the renaming of
streets. He saw in this the opportunity for “a
kind of public instruction”, and he gave
names such as these: Place Napoleón/ Rue
Impériale/ Porte Impériale/ Port de l’Empire/
Place des Victoires. Kramer sees in this epi-
sode the discovery of streetnames as a means
of political propaganda.
Place names, just as appellatives, often rep-
resent “semantic fields,” and some of these
are tied to specific linguistic forms. Two ex-
amples: religious places and the jargon of
business.
5.1.  Religious places. The designations of
places of worship and service often turn into
names of towns and smaller places. Two cases:
In Catholicism the designation of religious
sites, of churches and monasteries largely ad-
hered to the Greco-Latin tradition, and these
traditionbound appellatives, used time and
again and everywhere, remained, linguistic-
ally perceived, a reminder and lasting echo of
the medieval state of diglossia, the coexistence
of Latin and the vernacular, of the “high”
and “low” levels of language.
A study treating the reflections of Christian
life in the names of towns and villages of the
Iberian Peninsula (Lopez Santos 1952: 17—
27) lists many examples of Latin appellatives
that in the past had referred to religious in-
stitutions and now, only superficially popu-
larized, have turned into placenames. Exam-
ples: oratorium ‘place for prayer’ → Oratorio.
— monasterium → Monasterio/ Monesterio.
— coemeterium ‘cemetery’ → Cementario/ Ci-
mentiri.
In Orthodox Greece the impact of the Ro-
man Catholic Church is reflected in Italian
names of churches and monasteries (Kahane
159.  Names in Language Contact: Foreign Placenames
1940: 3 22—3 28): Corfu ΛόντζατοῦΣάνΤζά-
κομοLóntza toû Sán Tzákomo ‘Loggia of San
Giacomo’, name of the mayoralty of Corfu,
situated next to the Roman Catholic church
ΣάνΤζάκομοSán Tzákomo, built by the Vene-
tians in 163 3 , < Ital. San Giacomo ‘St.
James’. — Cephalonia ΣίσιαSísia n. plur.,
name of a Franciscan monastery (mentioned
in the 16th c.) and its environs, < Ital. Assisi,
the epithet of St. Francis. — Chios Παναγία
ἡ ΚουρνάPanagía hē Kourná, a church of the
Dominicans dedicated to the Virgin Mary,
mentioned since the 15th c., < Ital.
(In)coronata ‘Crowned Virgin Mary’.
5.2.  The jargon of business. Whereas fre-
quently appellatives are apt, as labels of cul-
tural and social features, to be used as
placenames, the reverse change also occurs:
placenames can become appellatives, which
are then borrowed by other languages. This
transformation, quite common in the Middle
Ages and particularly in the Romance lan-
guages, is characteristic of business-speak.
The product is named, quite succinctly, after
the place where it is produced, and that name
spreads with the product. The topic has been
discussed, in particular, by Vidos 1950 and
Höfler 1967. Vidos treats the names of Flem-
ish and Dutch towns and provinces such as
Brussels, Ghent and Brabant, which turned
into Romance appellatives, and he established
three syntactic frames which generated the
change: a) An adjectival use of the placename:
Fr. batelet gantois ‘small boat from Ghent’
> gantois ‘kind of boat’; Span. caballo frisón
‘Frisian horse’ > frisón ‘large draught horse’.
— b) Through juxtaposition of placename
and the kind of merchandise associated with
it: Bois-le-Duc, capital of Brabant, turns via
Span. cinta balduque ‘narrow tape’ > bal-
duque ‘narrow red tape’. — c) Through a
prepositional phrase: tulle de Bruxelles >
bruxelles ‘tulle’.
Höfler, searching for the linguistic causes
of the change from placename to appellative,
sees two possibilities. The one is “metonymy”,
the substitution of one designation of a thing
for another, which in the case at hand means
calling the product after the place of produc-
tion: in a glass of Burgundy the name of a
region in France stands for a wine there pro-
duced. The other explanation is one of “ellip-
sis”, omission: a glass of wine from Burgundy
is shortened to a glass of Burgundy. The habit
of an elliptic style of speech was — and is —
common, Höfler surmises, among business-
1031
men, and he quotes (p. 129), the once au-
thoritative eighteenth-century French Dic-
tionnaire de Trévoux, s. v. Rouen (the North-
ern-French city): “Se dit simplement parmi
les Marchands pour toile de Rouen”, Rouen
is used by businessmen simply for cloth from
Rouen.
The following examples are taken from
Vidos (1959, 195—204): Ypres (W Belgium)
→ Span. (14th c.) ypre, Venice (13 th c.) ipre/
ipra ‘tissue’; Ostende (NW Belgium) → Catal.
(15th c.) ostende/ ostenda, Span. (17th c.) os-
tenda; Holland → Fr. hollande, Portug. hol-
landa ‘paper’.
To these Romance cases we may add an
Eastern example: the development from the
name of a country via the corresponding ad-
jective into an appellative is exemplified by
the once wide-spread medieval word for
‘wootz’, the kind of steel used for the famous
Damascus swords (Kahane, Kahane, Austin
1946): Indian steel, known since antiquity,
was mediated by the Persians to the West.
They called it “Indian,” hindawáni, which
Byz. Grk. took over as ἰνδανικόν indanikón,
with offshoots such as the technical Latinism
andanicum, Venetian andanico and Old
French andaigne. Arabic used for the same
concept hind ‘Indian’ which turned into Span.
alfinde/ alinde ‘steel’ (Corominas-Pascual,
1980—91, s. v. alinde).
But not only products of commerce, also
phenomena of nature carry the names of the
place of their origin into other lands. Winds,
blowing from country to country, exemplify
the process (Kahane 1957): The Greek basis
*λιβύκιονlibýkion ‘coming from Libya’
turned into the name of the ‘southwest wind’
and has been used as such since the Middle
Ages in several languages of the Mediterra-
nean such as Old French lebeche, Ital. libeccio,
Arab. labaš. And from the fifteenth century
on, a wind coming from Provence became in
a region (such as the area of the Tyrrhenian
Sea) where ‘Provence’ and ‘northwest’ were
synonymous the name of the ‘northwest
wind’, and this wind name spread widely:
e. g., Catal. provença, Sicily pruvenza, Malta
(Arab.) provenz, Venetian, provenza ‘fog’.
6. Selected Bibliography
Bach, Adolf (1954): Die deutschen Ortsnamen 2:
Die deutschen Ortsnamen in geschichtlicher, geo-
graphischer, soziologischer und psychologischer
Betrachtung. Heidelberg.
1032
Battisti, Carlo (1963 ): Popoli e lingue dell’Alto
Adige. In: Carlo Battisti, ed., L’Alto Adige nel
passato e nel presente. Firenze, 30—55.
Corominas, Joan, Pascual, José A. (1980—1991):
Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispán-
ico. Madrid.
Cortelazzo, Manlio (1986): Zoonimi di origine ita-
liana nella toponomastica dei portolani greci. I n:
Onomastica 10, 71—76. (Rpt. in M. Cortelazzo,
Venezia, il Levante e il mare, 505—510. Pisa, 1989.)
FEW = Walther von Wartburg (1928 ff.): Fran-
zösisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Bonn etc.
Georgacas, Demetrius (1949/50): Italian place-
names in Greece and place-names from Italian
loanwords. In: Beiträge zur Namenforschung, 1/2,
149—170; 266—270.
Höfler, Manfred (1967): Untersuchungen zur Tuch-
und Stoffbenennung in der französischen Urkun-
densprache: Vom Ortsnamen zum Appellativum.
In: Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, Beiheft
114.
Kahane, Henry, Kahane, Renée (1940): Italienische
Ortsnamen in Griechenland (Texte und Forschun-
gen zur byzantinisch-neugriechischen Philologie
36). Athen.
Kahane, Henry, Kahane, Renée (1957): Toponyms
as Anemonyms. In: Names 5, 241—245.
Kahane, Henry, Kahane, Renée (1971): From land-
mark to toponym. In: Sprache und Geschichte
[Harri Meier Testimonial]. München, 253—258.
Kahane, Henry, Kahane, Renée, Austin, Herbert
D. (1946): Byzantine ἰνδανικὸς σίδηρος, Frankish
andanicum ‘Indian steel’ Byzantina-Metabyzantina,
1, 181—187.
Kramer, Johannes (1985): Französische Straßen-
namen in einigen rheinischen Städten. In: Beiträge
zur Namenforschung 20, 9—18.
160. Namen in Sprachinseln: Deutsch
1. Untersuchungsgebiet
2. Ortsnamen
3. Personennamen
4. Zusammenfassung
5. Literatur (in Auswahl)
1. Untersuchungsgebiet
1.1.  Allgemeines: Aus der Fülle von deutschen
Sprachinseln, die dem Osten, Südosten und
Süden des deutschen Sprachraums vorgela-
gert sind, bzw. bis zu ihrer teilweisen Entvöl-
IX. Namen im Sprachkontakt
Lebel, Paul (1961): Onomastique. In: Encyclopédie
de la Pleiade, XI. Paris, 677—723.
Longnon, Auguste (1920—1929): Les noms de lieu
de la France. Paris.
López Santos, Luis (1952): Influjo de la vida cris-
tiana en los nombres de pueblos españoles. León.
Matthews, C. M. (1972): Place Names of the Eng-
lish-Speaking World. New York.
Piel, Joseph (193 3 /3 4—1944): Os nomes germâni-
cos na toponímia portuguesa. In: Boletin de Fil-
ologia, 2—6.
Rohlfs, Gerhard (1944): Streifzüge durch die ita-
lienische Toponomastik. In: Archiv für das Stu-
dium der Neueren Sprachen 184, 103—129.
Roy, Gabrielle (1962): Le Manitoba. Rpt. in Roy,
Fragiles lumières de la terre. Montréal, 1978, 101—
120.
Sachs, Georg (193 2): Die germanischen Ortsnamen
in Spanien und Portugal. (Berliner Beiträge zur
Romanischen Philologie, II/4). Berlin.
Schneller, Christian (1896): Beiträge zur Ortsna-
menkunde Tirols. Drittes Heft. Innsbruck.
Stewart, George (1982): Names on the Land. 4th
ed. San Francisco.
Vidos, B. E. (1950): Noms de villes et de provinces
flamands et néerlandais devenus noms communs
dans les langues romanes. Rpt. in Vidos, Prestito
(1965): Espansione e migrazione dei termini tecnici
nelle lingue romanze e non romanze (Biblioteca
dell’“Archivum Romanicum”, ser. II, vol. 3 1).
Roma, 185—209.
Zgusta, Ladislav (1984): Kleinasiatische Ortsna-
men (Beiträge zur Namenforschung, NF. Beiheft
21). Heidelberg.
Henry (†) and Renée Kahane,
Urbana, Ill. (U.S.A.)
kerung im Zuge der politischen Entwicklun-
gen in der 2. Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts (vgl.
Wiesinger 1980; 1983; Kranzmayer 1956, 5 ff.;
Hornung 1986), werden hier vorzüglich jene
behandelt, die von Österreich aus besiedelt
wurden. Sie befinden bzw. befanden sich u. a.
in Italien, Slowenien, Ungarn, Rumänien,
Tschechien, Slowakei, weitere vgl. Czoernig
(1855).
1.2.  Wirklich gut erhalten sind die deutschen
Sprachinseln in Italien. Sie gliedern sich in
folgende Gruppen: