„Ortsnamen zwischen Rhein und Elbe – Onomastik im Europäischen Raum“. Ein Forschungsprojekt der Göttinger Akademie der Wissenschaften

JŪRGEN UDOLPH Centre for Name Research – Göttingen Göttingen Academy of Sciences ORCID iD: orcid.org/0000-0002-8475-7857 Research areas: Historical linguistics, hydronymy, place names, family names. DOI: doi.org/10.35321/all87-16 PLACE NAMES BETWEEN THE RHINE AND THE ELBE – ONOMASTICS IN THE EUROPEAN SPACE. A RESEARCH PROJECT OF THE GÖTTINGEN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES Place Names between the Rhine and the Elbe – Onomastics in the European Space. Research project of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences ANNOTATION The place names of the German federal states of Lower Saxony and Westphalia (part of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia) that were attested before 1600, including the names of deserted towns and villages, are critically examined on the basis of their historical evidence and linguistically examined according to their origin and interpretation etymologically, morphologically and typologically, with the volumes of the NOB (Niedersächsisches Ortsnamenbuch) to be an example. Once the work is completed, maps and summary papers will provide an evaluation of the question of origin, etymological connections and settlement history. The results will also be relevant for Scandinavia, England, Eastern Europe (including the Baltic States) and parts of Central Europe. KEYWORDS: place names, names of deserted places, settlement history, Germanic peoples, Saxons. 326 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXXVII Ortsnamen zwischen Rhein und Elbe – Onomastik im Europäischen Raum. Ein Forschungsprojekt der Göttinger Akademie der Wissenschaften BACKGROUND The background to the project of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences discussed here began on 18 October 1990 in the rooms of the Linguistics Seminar at the University of Göttingen. On that day, the first session of the proseminar Place Names as a Source for History, with the subtitle The Place Names of the Wolfenbüttel District, was held under the direction of Jürgen Udolph. Several students took part, including Kirstin Casemir and Uwe Ohainski, who not only have accompanied the project ever since, but have also provided decisive support for it continuously since that day. The plan was to launch, with the Wolfenbüttel district, a project devoted to the place names and deserted-settlement names of the state of Lower Saxony. In other federal states of Germany, sometimes comprehensive investigations of settlement names had already begun and had already produced important results. Corresponding studies were almost entirely lacking for Lower Saxony. The seminar, once begun, continued uninterrupted in the following years until 2000. The place names of the districts of Wolfenbüttel, Göttingen, Osterode/Harz, Goslar, Northeim, Holzminden, Hildesheim, Hameln-Pyrmont, Hanover (including the city of Hanover), Peine, Celle, Helmstedt and Gifhorn, as well as the cities of Braunschweig and Hanover, were studied. The events at the University of Göttingen were interrupted, however, in 1999–2000 because J. Udolph had received an appointment to the professorship of onomastics at the University of Leipzig and accepted it after a replacement semester in the winter semester of 1999–2000. The work on the place names of Lower Saxony was not interrupted, however. It had been possible to interest cities and districts in Lower Saxony in these investigations and to obtain financial support for them. The city and district of Hanover in particular showed great interest; therefore, from approximately 1996–1997, the investigations of the place names and deserted-settlement names of the area could be intensified, and the results of the work were published in 1998 as the first volume of a Book of Lower Saxony Place Names (= NOB I). Two years later, the place names of the Osterode district followed (= NOB II). Several years earlier, J. Udolph’s extensive study Onomastic Investigations into the Germanic Problem (1994) had appeared. It addressed a series of Germanic-origin root words and suffixes and their occurrence in place names of the Old Germanic settlement area, and these could also be more precisely determined with the help of mapping. It emerged that the states of Lower Saxony, parts of Saxony-Anhalt, Įžvalgos / Insights 327 JÜRGEN UDOLPH Thuringia, Hesse and Westphalia have a particular share in the distributions. This encouraged the authors of the NOB to continue working on the place names of northern and central Germany. Closely connected with these considerations was K. Casemir’s study of the place names of the Wolfenbüttel district and the city of Salzgitter (= NOB III), completed as a dissertation in 2003, in which the author also, in a commendable manner, linked archaeological and settlement-historical aspects with the place names. Her master’s thesis on the -büttel names (Casemir 1997) was also an important contribution to the study of the place names of Lower Saxony as well. After his appointment to Leipzig, J. Udolph was able, in a conversation with the president of the Göttingen Academy, to convince her that a book of place names for Lower Saxony would be an important and necessary task for the Academy. To make a long story short: following lengthy discussions and conversations within the Union of German Academies of Sciences, the project—expanded to include Saxony-Anhalt and Westphalia—was incorporated into Germany’s largest humanities and social-sciences research programme, the Academies Programme. Supervision was entrusted to the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, the research office was established at the University of Münster, and investigations began in 2005. THE PROJECT Initially, under the direction of J. Udolph, Hendrik Davids, Michael Flöer, Claudia Maria Korsmeier, Brigit Meineke and Jutta Schröder worked on the project. Somewhat later, K. Casemir joined as head of the research office, followed by U. Ohainski, Josef Dolle and, for periods, Jens Kersting. At first, the project was planned for 32½ years and comprised the investigation of the place names of the states of Lower Saxony (including Bremen and Bremerhaven), Westphalia and Saxony-Anhalt. As a result of internal decisions by the academies, the duration was shortened to 25 years, which forced us to abandon Saxony-Anhalt. We deeply regretted this. There is no need to provide here a detailed description of the project, the state of its progress, its objectives and other related aspects. It can be found on a website of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences at https://adw-goe.de/forschung/forschungsprojekte-akademienprogramm/ortsnamen-zwischen-rhein-und-elbe/ and under the link PlaceNames.net. 328 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXXVII Ortsnamen zwischen Rhein und Elbe – Onomastik im Europäischen Raum. Ein Forschungsprojekt der Göttinger Akademie der Wissenschaften In brief, the project’s objective can be formulated as follows: the place names attested before 1600 in the area under investigation, including deserted-settlement names, are critically examined on the basis of their historical attestations and investigated linguistically, with regard to their origin and interpretation, from etymological, morphological and typological perspectives, using the volumes of the Book of Lower Saxony Place Names as a model. Once the work has been completed, maps and summary treatises will provide an evaluation concerning the question of origin, etymological connections and settlement history. Two maps, which we reproduce here, show the current state of the work: MAP 1: Westphalian Book of Place Names – State of work, October 2022 Įžvalgos / Insights 329 JÜRGEN UDOLPH MAP 2: Book of Lower Saxony Place Names – State of work, October 2022 From the beginning of the investigations, an attempt has been made to provide an account that is also comprehensible to interested non-specialists. The debate about the so-called “ivory tower”, in which academic research allegedly operates, arose not least because scholarly publications have sometimes used—and continue to use—a form of language that created distance from the interested public. In Indo-European studies, this distance has been greatly intensified by the introduction of the so-called “laryngeals” and their graphic representation, which has also entered place-name research. In this case too, our aim is to reduce this distance in the treatment of place names. Place names are of great interest to the public as well, and it is therefore necessary to choose language and presentation that are easy to understand. The subproject Westphalian Book of Place Names will be completed in 2022 with volume 20, while the Book of Lower Saxony Place Names, planned for 28 volumes, is still in progress. 330 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXXVII Ortsnamen zwischen Rhein und Elbe – Onomastik im Europäischen Raum. Ein Forschungsprojekt der Göttinger Akademie der Wissenschaften We do not provide here a list of all volumes published to date. The website placenames.net provides information under the headings Book of Lower Saxony Place Names and Westphalian Book of Place Names, where overview maps of the corresponding areas of investigation can also be found. The published volumes are initially available through bookstores, but three years after their publication (the expiry of the embargo period), they are available on res doctae – the document server of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, where a search form also facilitates finding the desired place names (https://rep.adw-goe.de/). FOUNDATIONS, OBJECTIVES AND INITIAL RESULTS OF THE PROJECT 1. The relevance of place-name research lies not only in the question of the meaning of an individual name. Although the opacity of geographical names repeatedly prompts the question, “What does this name actually mean?”, this alone yields only fragmentary insights into linguistic or settlement history. More far-reaching insights can be gained only when a larger area has been investigated onomastically. Only then is it possible to grasp the original meaning of an individual name in its basic features. For this reason, a comprehensive evaluation of onomastic research rightly and repeatedly seeks a cartographic recording of the collected material and of the various levels with which the names are interconnected. 2. An investigation of the place-name inventory of Westphalia, Lower Saxony, Bremen and also Saxony-Anhalt is of particular significance for the prehistory and early history of Europe because, until the beginning of this project, there was a serious research gap, and because this previously unstudied territory is not only in the closest contact with neighbouring German states such as the Rhineland, Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Brandenburg, Saxony, Thuringia and Hesse, but, according to investigations of recent years, is strikingly connected with broad areas of Germania, with the West Slavic linguistic area, and, in its oldest traces, with the Baltic region and an Old Slavic settlement area in southern Poland and Ukraine. Įžvalgos / Insights 331 JÜRGEN UDOLPH 3. On the basis of the volumes published to date and other recent investigations, the following lines of connection can be drawn in detail; their significance still requires more precise investigation: a) From Lower Saxony and Westphalia towards England, with Belgium, the Netherlands and Flanders forming bridges (first mapping attempt: Udolph 1994: 775 [Map 55]). That close connections exist between the place-name inventories of northern and western Germany and those of England, and that they must be ancient, was recognized very early, among others by H. Jellinghaus (1898, 1902); E. Schröder (1933: 22) likewise expressed this view concerning the root word -horst on the basis of an investigation conducted for him: it was a “settlement word belonging exclusively to the Saxons, which they alone took with them to England and which also appears in a very remote area” (for further treatment of -horst see Udolph 1994: 776–796, cf. also Map 3). The same applies to other appellatives. Thus Hessmann 1985: 199 states: “Old English elements, insofar as they were not adopted from British or Scandinavian, almost always find their equivalent in the area of Old Saxon” (i.e. above all in Lower Saxony). A few years ago, we were able to support this with the help of a somewhat broader list of appellatives (Udolph 2006). Previously, in several contributions, he had selected individual appellatives and attempted, on the basis of the place names derived from them, to trace the migrations of West Germanic tribes to England (Udolph 1994: 765–830; 1995). The following Map 3 derives from this work; it contains Germanic horst, for example Middle High German hurst, also hürste, Old High German hurst, Old Saxon hurst ‘bushes, undergrowth’; Middle Low German, Middle Dutch hurst, horst, Dutch horst, and also Old English hyrst, English hurst, mostly meaning ‘copse, bushes, woodland, scrub, brushwood, low wood’, ‘a small vegetated elevation in swamp and moorland’, and similar. In the work on the place names of Westphalia and Lower Saxony, we encountered another phenomenon connected with England but hitherto never noticed: they partly contain appellatives found only in the Old English or English vocabulary. The consequence is considerable: it means that the underlying word, now preserved only in English, was formerly also alive in the Germanic dialects of northern Germany. Here is just one example. It is well attested in English since the Old English period: grif(e), grāf, grove ‘grove, woodland’, related to Slavic grabъ, grabь ‘hornbeam’ and other words. Various English place names have been formed with this word, such as Grafton or Grovehurst. This word is now also found in German place names such as Grastrup, Lippe District, Grafhorst, Helmstedt District, Grasdorf, Hanover Region, and perhaps also in Greven, Steinfurt District (most recently WOB 13: 123f.). 332 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXXVII Ortsnamen zwischen Rhein und Elbe – Onomastik im Europäischen Raum. Ein Forschungsprojekt der Göttinger Akademie der Wissenschaften MAP 3: horst/hurst in place names This also sheds new light on the old and supposedly already settled question of where the West Germanic settlers of England came from. It is almost universally assumed that they came from Schleswig-Holstein and Denmark; Bede’s famous sentence continues to have an effect to this day: “Adven­erunt autem de tribus Germaniae populis fortioribus, id est Saxonibus, Anglis, Jutis” [Saxons, Angles, Jutes]. However, investigations that sought to confirm this claim with the help of the place names of Schleswig-Holstein (e.g. Laur 1964) produced no results. It was concluded from this that name research cannot be consulted for this question. Initial indications, however, suggest that these views apparently do not apply to Lower Saxony. Once the investigation is complete, we will certainly obtain an answer to this question: place names are the most reliable witnesses for migrations; this is demonstrated by transfers to the German East, from Europe overseas, from the Russian heartlands to Siberia and elsewhere. The same applies to the homeland and origin of the Saxons. Until now, these questions have been treated almost exclusively from an archaeological and historical perspective. Recent investigations show that the alleged entry Saxones in Ptolemy, generally associated with Schleswig-Holstein, is probably a reading error (Springer 2002; 2004: 27–29). This removes an important cornerstone from the previous theory that the Saxons originally came from Schleswig-Holstein. The question is completely open. Considering that, Įžvalgos / Insights 333 JÜRGEN UDOLPH from an onomastic perspective, the first secure references to the Saxons are the English counties Essex, Middlesex, Sussex, Wessex, etc., place names also acquire important evidentiary value here: can comparisons between English and continental Germanic names tell us anything about the origin of the settlers of England? b) The study of the place names of Lower Saxony and Westphalia has also revealed connections with the vocabulary and name inventory of Schleswig-Holstein, Denmark and Scandinavia. These include place names and deserted-settlement names based on appellatives such as haugaz ‘hill, burial mound’, *hlaiwaz ‘(burial) mound’, klint ‘height, mountain’, malm- (also Gothic malma ‘sand’), wedel ‘shallow place in water, ford’, and many others. J. Udolph (1994: 830–918) treated several of these appellatives. From this collection, here is just one map (Map 4): MAP 4: wedel in place names c) The processing of the place names of the area under investigation has also produced correspondences, both in vocabulary and in the place-name inventory, with the Baltic and Slavic settlement areas and with the corresponding vocabulary and name inventory. They confirm early suppositions expressed by W. P. Schmid, according to which a centre of Old European 334 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXXVII Ortsnamen zwischen Rhein und Elbe – Onomastik im Europäischen Raum. Ein Forschungsprojekt der Göttinger Akademie der Wissenschaften hydronymy is to be seen in the Baltic region (Schmid 1994: 175–192, also 226–247), so that connections from northern Germany to the Baltic region are to be expected. In a broader framework, appellative correspondences between Baltic, Slavic and Germanic, and their reflection in the place-name inventory, should be considered; see Udolph (1994: 16–50; 2005). W. P. Schmid’s ideas were developed further, among others, by P. U. Dini and J. Udolph (Dini, Udolph 2005). Connections with the Baltic region are particularly clear in the place-name inventory of northern Germany. Examples of these peculiarities were listed by Udolph (1999) and Casemir, Udolph (2006). Work on the place names of Lower Saxony and Westphalia will bring further material to light. An interesting case is the place name Dransfeld near Göttingen (discussed in detail in NOB IV: 104–107), attested since the 10th century: 960 Threnesfelde, 1022 (forgery, first half of the 12th century) Dransuelt, Dransvelt, for the year 1078 (12th-century copy) Thransfellensem, etc. For the name formed with the generic element -feld, a basic form *Thranas-/*Thranes-feld must be assumed. The base word is to be interpreted as an s-containing derivation and connected with the Thracian place name Tran upara, the Latvian field name Trani, Tranaua and the Lithuanian river names Tranỹs, Tron is, which belong with Lithuanian trenkti ‘to rot, decay’, Latvian trenēt (treñu or trenu) ‘to rot, weather’. d) The area under investigation is also the source region for transfers of place names that took place in the course of the German eastward settlement, which gradually began in the 11th century. Every volume of the Brandenburg Book of Names (vols. 1–12, Weimar, later Stuttgart 1967–2005) contains a chapter on this phenomenon, usually called “name transfer”. Investigations of the place names of Lower Saxony and Westphalia are important supports in determining whether a name transfer has genuinely occurred, since this requires precise knowledge of the place name that is supposed to have been transferred. What is decisive is whether the historical attestations of this name at the time of the name transfer correspond to the attestations of the place name in the East—precisely on this point corrections are occasionally necessary. It may be mentioned in passing that closer observation of place names can also bring highly controversial questions nearer to resolution, such as whether the globally known Pied Piper legend can be regarded as a reflection of the German eastward settlement (approaches to this in Udolph 1997). 4. Investigation of the place names will also lead to new insights in other areas. Almost the entire area under investigation belongs Įžvalgos / Insights 335 JÜRGEN UDOLPH to the Low German area. An investigation of the numerous place names will make new and substantial material accessible to Low German philology. This concerns vocabulary, word formation, dialectology and language history as a whole. The poor transmission of Old Saxon can be decisively improved by obtaining this material. The advance of High German into Low German territory can also be followed exemplary through the place names and their transmission. Place names, as impartial witnesses of local languages and dialects, show in their development precisely the replacement of languages in a particular region and are indicators of tendencies in language change. The investigation of place names will not, however, merely considerably advance knowledge of the Low German vocabulary. Names, as the “graveyard of words”, preserve old elements to the present day, make the former distribution of designations clear, and assist decisively in the etymology not only of Low German but of all individual Germanic languages, above all Dutch, Frisian, English and ultimately High German as well. The present-day vocabulary by no means coincides in its distribution with the original spread. This can be outlined with the greatest possible precision only by including names. 5. The eastern part of the area under investigation is interspersed with Slavic place names. Place names reveal the multifaceted contacts between the Germanic, Old Saxon and Middle Low German elements on the one hand and the Slavic material on the other. Mixed names, deserted-settlement names, Germanizations and similar features reflect the settlement process. Modern settlement research no longer dispenses with the results of onomastics. Place names also reveal former and older settlement areas of Slavic tribes (the question of the original homeland, migration movements). 6. The theory of the Frankonization of the German place-name inventory has always played, and continues to play, a major role in German name research; it gained wide acceptance above all through the endorsement of A. Bach (Bach 1954: 157–174). This is also shown by a monograph by C. Jochum-Godglück (1995). According to this theory, place names in broad areas of Germany are said to have been assigned through Frankish influence from a centrally organized centre, e.g. Nordhausen, Südheim, Westendorf, Ostfeld. From a Westphalian, Lower Saxon and Frankish perspective, however, this theory 336 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXXVII Ortsnamen zwischen Rhein und Elbe – Onomastik im Europäischen Raum. Ein Forschungsprojekt der Göttinger Akademie der Wissenschaften has received little support (see Müller 1970: 244–270; Schuh 1980; Udolph 1998). Only a comprehensive examination of the place-name material of the area under investigation can provide a final clarification. 7. Place names are important witnesses to settlement history. They can be used for questions connected with the homeland and migrations of speakers and thus also of peoples. There have even been, and still are, voices that attribute sole competence to place names in questions concerning former and ancient settlement areas of peoples. Corresponding statements can already be found in Jacob Grimm, when he writes: “There is a more living testimony about peoples than bones, weapons and graves, and that is their languages” (Grimm 1845: 5), and elsewhere: “Without proper names, every source of the German language would have run dry throughout entire early centuries; indeed, the oldest evidence that we have for it at all lies precisely in them... for this very reason, investigating them sheds light on the language, customs and history of our ancestors” (Grimm 1871: 297). This early opinion fully accords with statements from the previous century, when we read in Hans Krahe (1949: 9): “Place names are rooted in the soil, tied to a region... and it is an established fact, a rule that almost amounts to a law, that place names—and specifically place names in the broadest sense, that is, river and mountain names, landscape and settlement names—often persisted with the greatest tenacity even when the population changed. They do not disappear in such a change, but in most cases are adopted by the new lords of a country and retained by them—though sometimes not understood—and incorporated into their own language. They thus continued to live on like fossils.” H. Krahe further states: “Where place names of a particular language are found in larger numbers, that language itself must also have been spoken there; members of the people speaking that language must have lived there” (Krahe 1949: 9f.). That is an important reason to turn to the place names of a region and investigate them as comprehensively as possible. 8. Combined with an investigation of the place names of a larger region which—as far as is known—was and is almost entirely settled by speakers of Germanic dialects, especially Low German here (Frisian, High German and Slavic traces in the place names should also be taken into account), this almost automatically raises the question of the extent to which this area can be counted among the oldest homelands of the Germanic peoples. Įžvalgos / Insights 337 JÜRGEN UDOLPH Even history books of the present day assume that this area could at most have had a marginal share in this; Scandinavia, Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein are still generally named as the homeland of Germanic tribes, although recently there has been somewhat more caution about making a precise determination. The long-standing thesis that there was a Germanic migration from the Scandinavian north to the German south is based essentially (although this is now scarcely recognized) on archaeological statements from the 1930s (Gustaf Kossinna), which, mixed with National Socialist ideology, led to the claim of a “Nordic” homeland of the Germanic peoples (see, for example, Brylla 2009). The simple question must be asked whether this thesis stands up in the light of the place names. Connected with this are questions concerning possible substrates, the so-called “original homeland,” prehistoric migrations and closer relationships among the Germanic languages. On the basis of the observations mentioned under point 4, however, one must assume that precisely the investigation of geographical names in a larger geographical area can provide more detailed information about whether this area was reached earlier or later by speakers of a particular language or, in other words, whether a longer settlement period can be assumed or not. The planned processing of several tens of thousands of place and deserted-settlement names will, with a high degree of probability, make it possible—or even necessary—to arrive at more precise and, above all, reliable information on the question of the sequence of settlement; more specifically: do the names point to a migration of Germanic tribes from another direction into the area under investigation, or should continuous settlement be assumed from the time an Indo-European precursor language was separated out? 9. Another important aspect can and will be brought closer to clarification through the processing of the place names of the area under investigation: not least through H. Krahe and W. P. Schmid’s discovery of the “Old European Hydronymy,” a network of pre-individual-language water names spanning large parts of Europe, it has become clear that Germanic developed only gradually from a pre-Germanic but Indo-European linguistic and naming inventory. This applies not only to Germanic, but also to all other individual Indo-European languages. Connected with this is the question of whether this transition—from the perspective of Germanic—can be traced with the help of place names. 338 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXXVII Ortsnamen zwischen Rhein und Elbe – Onomastik im Europäischen Raum. Ein Forschungsprojekt der Göttinger Akademie der Wissenschaften Should we not expect there to be place names, and especially water names, that can be attributed to a kind of “intermediate stage”? In other words: do these names contain an Indo-European basis but at the same time already display features specific to an individual language, in our case Germanic peculiarities? If they do exist, some of them are likely to be place names also based on water names and thus able to contribute to further work on Old European Hydronymy. CONCLUSION AND RESULTS OF THE PROJECT It is planned, after completion of approximately 50 place-name books, to present a summarizing evaluation of the results. This will also address, on the basis of maps—which we consider particularly valuable—questions concerning the origin of the place names, etymological connections and settlement history, especially since the Onomastics is a discipline linked in diverse ways with other branches of science. Its results are taken up and further utilized, among others, in the following fields of science: • Historical geography and settlement history • Settlement archaeology • Tribal and ethnic history • Linguistic and cultural history • Historical ethnology • Legal, social and economic history • Agricultural and urban history • Constitutional, political and territorial history • Church history • Personal history. It will also be necessary to subject the still occasionally accepted concept of a so-called “Northwest Bloc” (H. Kuhn), which almost completely coincides with the area under investigation, to careful scrutiny. One of its main theses is that place names in this area show no traces of the First or Germanic Sound Shift, and that Germanic settlers therefore reached this region only after these changes had been completed. In the volumes published so far, we have found no reliable evidence for this thesis. Insights / Insights 339 JÜRGEN UDOLPH In this connection, the well-known close linguistic relationship between Frisian and English, as a given (English church ~ Frisian tsiritse and the like), may also play a role. It must be examined how these commonalities developed from an onomastic perspective. According to Hans Kuhn, it is also possible for correspondences to extend across the sea. Place names must be consulted here as important witnesses. The same applies to the recently renewed and strongly increasing tendency to explain the water names of Germany from Celtic. This approach is readily taken when a name is difficult to explain. In the case of obscure and difficult names, scholars have recently once again been quick to invoke “Celtic relics.” Here too, the project will ultimately yield well-founded statements. This can be combined with the recently increasing recognition that it is not Celtic but rather Baltic and Slavic that may assist in explaining disputed ancient names in Germania. As mentioned above, in Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia, some extremely ancient place names can be explained only with the help of Baltic and Slavic. They document close connections with eastern Europe and show that the alleged “foreign Eastern European languages” are close relatives of Germanic. Finally, let us point to an aspect that one may not necessarily have in mind when working on place names: family history and genealogy, newly and decisively revitalized also by the Internet, depend on thorough and careful place-name research. In the case of names of origin, the question of which place is the source of a family name depends on an exact investigation of the historical attestations. This question also concerns research outside Europe, for example genealogy in the U.S.A., Canada or Australia. Numerous inquiries from overseas can currently be answered only hesitantly because key areas from which emigrants originated, such as Westphalia and Lower Saxony, have not yet been investigated toponymically. As mentioned above, at the end of the investigation it should be possible—and should be aimed for—to provide a summarizing evaluation of the settlement history of the three regions of Westphalia, Bremen and Lower Saxony in the light of the names. This will also touch on the genetic settlement research intensified in recent decades and will decisively bring closer to it the consequences arising from the names. 340 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXXVII Ortsnamen zwischen Rhein und Elbe – Onomastik im Europäischen Raum. Ein Forschungsprojekt der Göttinger Akademie der Wissenschaften LITERATURE Bach Adolf 1954: The German Place Names, vol. 2, Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag. 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WOB 13 – Korsmeier Claudia Maria 2009: The Place Names of the District and City of Hannover, Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte. Place Names between the Rhine and the Elbe – Onomastics in the European Area. Research project of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences S U M M A R Y Based on historical data, the article critically analyzes the place names of the German federal states of Lower Saxony and Westphalia (part of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia) attested before 1600, including the names of deserted towns and villages. The study also provides a linguistic analysis of these place names with regard to their origin and their etymological, morphological and typological interpretation, using the Lower Saxon Place-Name Book as an example. Once the study is completed, maps and research summaries will evaluate the question of origin, etymological connections and the settlement history of the localities. The results of the study will be useful for research on Scandinavia, England, Eastern Europe (including the Baltic States) and certain regions of Central Europe. Received on August 21, 2022. JŪRGEN UDOLPH Center for Name Research – Göttingen / Rosdorf, Steinbreite 9, D–37124 Rosdorf bei Göttingen Göttingen Academy of Sciences Work Office Place Names between the Rhine and the Elbe – Onomastics in the European Area Robert-Koch-Str. 29, D–48149 Münster [email protected] Įžvalgos / Insights 343