Re: [tied] Hans Bahlow [Re: Permian]

At 4:55:39 AM on Saturday, April 22, 2006, g wrote:

>> Bahlow's place-name etymologies are untrustworthy: he had
>> a Sumpf fetish and identified any number of supposed
>> Sumpfwörter that aren't generally accepted. (And I'm not
>> sure that I've seen a single correct etymology of an
>> English place-name in that book, or in his Deutschlands
>> Geographische Namenwelt.)

> Which etymologies are (only) *his* and which are not! :-)

Specifically, almost every place-name etymology that he
takes back to some alleged PIE root meaning 'Sumpf',
'Morast', 'Schmutzwasser', etc. I'm not the only one to
notice this by any means. 'Neben der Masse der vielen von
H. Bahlow frei erfundenen vorgeschichtlichen 'Sumpf'-Wörtern
ist _vi_ ausnahmsweise als Appellativ belegt.' (From n.209
of Paul Derks, 'Der Burgen-, Orts- und Flurname _Altena_ und
seine Verwandten', ELiSe: Essener Linguistische Skripte --
elektronisch, Jahrgang 0, Heft 1, 2000, Seite 31-205.)

[...]

> (a recent edition:
> Hans Bahlow: Deutsches Namenslexikon, Suhrkamp 1985,
> ISBN 3-518-36565-7)

Ja. Suhrkamp Taschenbuch 65. That's the edition that I
have. It's not a bad book in general; you simply can't
trust the place-name etymologies of the type that I
described above.

Brian