Leipzig – die Herkunft des Namens ist rein slawisch!

Abstract

Leipzig – the origin of the name is purely Slavonic! – It thanks to Karlheinz Hengst that the centuries-old onomastic legend about the name of Leipzig as Old Sorbian *Lipsk- meaning ‘place of lime-trees’ has been called in question. Instead of that legend and a possible new one consisting in the recent interpretation as ‘place in an area abounding with river water’ to a pre-Slavonic (Germanic) root the paper shows that the oldest evidence of the toponym finds an easy explanation as a purely Slavonic one. The from Thietmar’s chronicle is nothing else than Old Sorbian *Liḃci/*Liḃcě, formed as a plural inhabitants’ name on the basis of *liḃc ‘a lean, feeble, puny person’. This explanation is well founded by a series of similarly structured and semantically comparable Czech place names on the one hand and by the historical evidence of the root *lib- in several Slavonic languages on the other. Further, the author questions that later forms of the name containing -, -, - etc originally represent the suffix -sk-. They probably are an early alternative deminutive form *Liḃčky increasing the nature of the toponym as a nickname, the forms Lipsk, Lipsko of modern Polish, Sorbian and Czech presumably being the result of interpreting (written and spoken) Germanized forms from the 14th century.