tgpedersen wrote:
> It seems unlikely that an abbot would own a brook. The other option
> is that the Abtsbach was named from the Abtsmühle. I was wondering
> what type of monastic order permits an abbot to personally own such
> a valuable asset as a Wassermühle?
Why the abbot personally? The mill belonged to the abbey and the abbot
was the head of the abbey, representing it in the locals' minds, so to
speak. That's enough to associate the abbot (in his legal capacity) with
the mill. Likewise, a placename like Kingsmill may be named after a
property that used to belong to the crown, but not personally to the
king, who wouldn't even have been aware of its existence. "Possessive"
hydronyms derived from personal names or from nouns referring to people
are quite common. Direct ownership is not the only kind of relation that
can lead to such naming.
> Did those hydronymic debunkers, after all their merriment, consider
> the possibility that Abts- "abbot's" here was a learned etymology?
Yes, hence the part about checking the older name of the river, which
has turned out to have been something completely different. <Abtsbach>
is not attested before the 18th century. One could blatantly refuse to
accept any kind of refutation and insist that perhaps the name "Aps" has
existed for thousand of years alongside other, alternative names for the
same brook. That, however, would only be an unprovable statement of
desperate faith.
Finally, if transmitted by the early mediaeval Slavic occupants of the
area, *aps- (whether borrowed in this form from an unknown ethnos or,
more likely, from Gmc. *afs-) would have been simplified to *os- due to
the constraints of Slavic phonotactics, and the German-speakers who came
there about the 13th c. would not have been able to restore the labial.
Piotr