> Seems to me a lot more convincing than "ice-free water" for Plön.
> If we have Slavic etymologies (at least one a good one), do we need
to
> consider Torsten's Nordwestblock obsession?
If we look at the hydronymics layer, there's the river Pinnau (<
*pinne, there is a Pinneberg), the island Pagensand in the lower Elbe
(PIE *pag-, *pak- "pole" etc ? cf.
http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/HbHpHg.html
)
, and even the island Poel in Mecklenburg. The interesting thing,
though, is that there seems to be no Pre-Germanic names in p- of towns
or villages in Northern Lower Saxony / Holstein, unlike the
Nordwestblock area proper.
As to my obsession with the Nordwestblock: Recent political decisions
have been based on the generally accepted assumption that democracy is
universally desired, but recent political developments haven't borne
that out. Somewhere there is a nagging doubt that democracy is not a
formal system but a mindset of the people who have it. I thought it
would be interesting to discover how much of that could be discerned
in the areas where democracy as we know it began, through layers of
conquests and conscious eradication of local custom.
Torsten