A long overdue onomastic action on Old Sorbian *Pro- or Old Sorbs as threshold carvers?

Résumé

In conflict with the fact that the Slavic morpheme *pro, while well established as both a preposition and a prefix in the near Czech language, does not exist at all in the two living Sorbian languages, there are seven instances for which the established research tradition without any reservation has assumed this prefixal morpheme to be a part of Old Sorbian oikonyms. These are the place names Prosigk, Preskeln, Proschitz, Prohlis, Profen, Proschim/Prožym and Rolika, which are situated between the rivers Saale and Neiße in eastern Germany, and which are documented in a compendium by Ernst Eichler. In this article, I make a suggestion for other (autosemantic) elements that could be assumed instead of the (synsemantic) morpheme in question, e.g. *prog ›threshold‹, which could explain up to four or five of the cases. There are two more general historical dialect processes (vowel contraction over /g/ and Meissen palatalisation) that support the etymological interpretation proposed. In this context, the article treats several other oikonyms of Old Sorbian origin, including the relationship between the German and Sorbian name Prietitz/Protecy. This paper also takes up the issue of a possible Czech influence on the Old Sorbian oikonymic landscape. As convincing or questionable some of the proposals might be in their details, they nonetheless represent an onomasiological action that has been long overdue. The conditions to raise the issue and/or to search for solutions seem to have existed for a long time already.