Die Mark Schmelz in der Dübener Heide: Ein Exempel in Sachen Flurnamenforschung

Minor names or microtoponyms are typically collected and analysed in etymological dictionaries. However, this may not be the most productive method in every case. More importantly, names should be analysed within the context of the communication community whose members created and used them. In rural settlements, these were primarily landowners. With the threefield crop rotation system (Dreifelderwirtschaft), which dominated agriculture in Central Europe from the Middle Ages until the 19th century, farmers had to be in constant discourse about the areas under cultivation, and this was not possible without using microtoponyms. For this reason, land users in each and every village established a special system of nomination within their local subdistrict. A detailed investigation of these names, taking account of this local perspective and considering the geographical, linguistic, sociolinguistic, ecological and historical context, identifies the specific reasons behind each individual nomination, which is very helpful in determining the meaning of more or less frequent name elements in general. Thus, only detailed studies of this kind provide a sound basis for various analyses – etymological, cognitive and others – of microtoponyms in general. This is demonstrated with the example of one local subdistrict, namely, a deserted village in a hilly and forested part of the countryside between Berlin and Leipzig. The minor names there have to be extracted from artificial nominations for land parcels, created for the purposes of land reallocation in the 19th century. The names were analysed and subsequently set in relation to the context suggested by different archival sources