HeidelbergCement AG - Vivacon - AG, Labetrunk für Magenleidende - Maaloxan

Unternehmens- und Markennamen zwischen Wirtschaft und Recht

Résumé

Contrasting company names such as, e.g., HeidelbergCement AG or Vivacon AG and trademarked brand names for products and services such as, e.g., Labetrunk für Magenleidende (trademarked in 1894) or Maaloxan (a current name for a remedy against stomach complaints) is interesting from the perspective of law, economy and language. On the legal side, there are opposing requirements for the motivation of such names, i.e. for the possibility of inferring characteristics of the company or the product. For product names, motivation should be as low as possible. What would be ideal in this respect would be completely unmotivated, but maximally distinctive “labels” without any relation to other names or other existing words. Company names, in contrast, at least until the change in trade law in the year 1998, had to be strongly motivated with regard to the associates / owners / founders as well as to the object and location of the company. For economic reasons, however, companies prefer medium degrees of motivation for both names types, to a certain extent describing the company and its products positively or at least creating positive associations. The linguistic means available to the name creators for solving this problem are presented in a systematic way in this paper. The data basis is the Waarenzeichenblatt, later Warenzeichenblatt, today Markenblatt, in which since 1894 until the present all newly protected brand names are published. This historical material allows for investigating the use of the relevant linguistic means in brand names from the beginnings until the first decade of the 21st century. With the 21st century and the “Third Reich”, two epochs are in focus which clearly demonstrate the dependence of the linguistic form on extralinguistic factors deriving from the domains of law, politics, economy and society