Place-name loan and place-name adaptation: two sides of the same coin? : Some terminological considerations from an ongoing thesis project

The paper focuses on terminological challenges concerning place-name loan and place-name adaptation, the central research objects within the field of contact onomastics. The challenges include a number of rivaling problematic definitions of the terms used in literature, which in most cases lead to overlapping or underlapping of the target population of the language phenomena in question. The main aim of the paper is to establish what place-name adaptation actually is and what kind of relation there is between place-name loan and place-name adaptation. One of my main suggestions is to draw a sharper border between place-name loan and place-name adaptation, two onomastic phenomena which are intimately related to each other, but are still different in nature. This will allow us to categorize so called non-adapted loan names. I am also introducing a term place-name replication, which I find a better alternative to place-name loan. Place-name replication implies a transfer of a source place-name copy, which can be adapted in the process, into the target language onomasticon, while place-name loan suggests that the target language came into possession of the loan place-name only for some limited period of time