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Summary
The Saar-Moselle Region as an Area of Lexical and
Onomastic Encounter and Interference. The DFG Project
‘Northern Words’ and ‘Southern Words’
The project at hand (‘Northern words’ and ‘Southern words’. Old Word
Layers in Place Names and Field Names and their Informational Value
regarding the Position of the Saar-Moselle Region within West Germania)
applies the methods of field name geography and analyzes toponymie material
compiled at the ASFSL (Archive of Place Names and Field Names of the
Saarland and Germanophone Lorraine) in Saarbmcken. As sound geography
research has shown, the Saar-Moselle region is an area of encounter and inter¬
ference of northern and southern linguistic phenomena. Yet it also needs to be
characterized as such on the basis of word geography. This first became evi¬
dent in analyses of the region’s late medieval literary language and has been
confirmed by the word geographic investigation of the ASFSL inventory
undertaken as part of the ‘Northern words’ and ‘Southern words’ project. To
illustrate the intentions of the project, two examples are given: one of a
‘Northern word’ (a word with an older word geographic connection to
Ripuarian, Low Franconian, Low German and Dutch) and one of a ‘Southern
word’ (a word to be placed in an Upper German-Alemannic context). The
‘Northern word’ is mersch adj. ‘marshy’ or Mersch noun ‘marsh’, which is
recorded in Old Saxon, Middle Low German, Old Frisian, Middle Dutch as
well as in Old English and can be traced from the 14th century onwards in
field names of the Saar-Moselle region. The ‘Southern word’ is Reben, whose
collective plural form has come to mean ‘vineyard’ and was not only a
productive element in Alemannic but has also been a name element within the
toponymy of the area under investigation since the 14th century.
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