The linguistic-historical significance of the field name variants in the Heppenheim Mark descriptions

Abstract

Among the surviving early medieval boundary descriptions from the
German-speaking area, descriptions that are preserved in two versions are relatively
rare. These include the two descriptions of the Mark Heppenheim, in which
the majority of the field names mentioned as boundary points are identical, even
though some names have different spellings. Although interpretations of these
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Flurnamenvarianten in den Heppenheimer Markbeschreibungen
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names exist, there is no comprehensive study of the name variants. In this article,
the field name variants from the Heppenheim descriptions are therefore first de-
scribed linguistically with regard to their graphic, phonic, semantic and morpho-
logical characteristics, and then explained from a linguistic-historical perspective.
Several possible explanations suggest themselves for the name variants, most of
which can apply simultaneously: In some cases, it is purely written variation, but
in most cases there are influences from more recent language stages and/or regio-
nal varieties. Latin-Romance interference is also possible, but uncertain. It is also
noticeable that the first and older description contains more recent forms of the
names, while the second, more recent description contains older forms.