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

Résumé

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 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 described linguistically with regard to their graphic, phonic, semantic and morphological 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 regional 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.