Piotr Gasiorowski wrote:
> Imagine the
> excitement of an "Old Europeanist" who finds a brook called <Aps> in
> what is now Poland and used to be part of Germany. What we surely have
> here is *Ap-s-, a well-known "Old European root" (*ap-/*ab- 'water,
> river') with a common "hydronymic suffix" (*-s-). Then, alas, somebody
> else finds out that back in the 19th c. the brook was locally known as
> Abtsbach 'abbot's brook', and that there are also toponyms like 'abbot's
> mill' nearby -- and there goes the Old European etymology.
The details of this true story are amusing and instructive (they are
given in Zbigniew Babik's 2001 hefty book about the oldest layer of
Polish toponyms). The Silesian hydronym <Abs> was first discussed by
Demelt (1940), who classified it as Illyrian (quoting several similar
names in the Baltic and Balkan regions: Apsos, etc.); he reconstructed
the old name as *apis(a). Krahe (1962 and elsewhere, cited by numerous
other Old Europeanists) accepted Demelt's analysis but naturally
reclassified the name as Old European and changed the reconstruction to
*apsa (failing to address the question how the medial cluster managed to
survive the Slavicisation of the local toponymy in the early Middle
Ages). It was only in 1996 that Domanski pointed to the earlier (19th
c.!) documented spelling of the name, <Abts-B(ach)>. The
orthographically mutilated variant <Abs-Bach>, also abbreviated to
<(die) Abs>, seen on some maps, was presumably the the only one known to
Demelt. There used to be a mill on the river, shown as <Abts-M(ühle)> or
<Aps-M(ühle)> on 18th-20th-c. maps. It was once the property of the
Benedictine/Cistercian abbey at Krzeszów, and this fact explains the
<Abts-> element quite satisfactorily. Domanski also notes that 13th-c.
sources give the same river's name as <Dupyzha> (Slavic *Dupica), which
suggests renaming it as 'the abbot's brook' (or rather 'the brook
turning the abbot's mill') in fairly recent times.
Piotr