Slavia Tirolensis — Place Names of Slavic Origin in Tyrol

Austria has inherited a large number of Slavic place names, the oldest of which date back to the late 6th century. At that time, the Slavs migrated from their original homeland beyond the Carpathians (today`s western Ukraine) towards central Europe and thus settled also in Austria. Slavic settlements reached as far as Eastern Tyrol, which can be witnessed by place Names such as Kals, Tristach and Prägraten. The methods of Slavic linguistics allow us to draw several conclusions from the appearance of these names: We know that, in the first place, e.g. Prägraten (from Slavic *pregrada) wall or obstacle, and, in the second place, that the name can only have entered German after about 780: It shows the conversion of the sequences er and ar to re and ra that, around 780, changed Proto Slavonic *pergarda into *pregrada. Although especially the past three decades have seen a boom concerning the research of Eastern Tyrolean place names, some significant gaps can be discerned: For example, the place names of the Lienz basin, the rear Virgen valley and the Defereggen have not yet been subject to systematic research, whereas those of the Kals valley have been treated almost to a full extent. From a methodological point of view, the gap lies in the fact that there is only one dedicated Slavist among the researchers involved up to today. While this makes the status quo all the more remarkable, it has inevitably led to a number of misinterpretations that can only be recognized with a trained eye. For example, the name Virgen cannot be traced back to Proto-Slavic *bergu mountain, river bank, because Slavic e is normally also rendered as e in German. Instead, we must assume a form with i in the first syllable, i.e. *birgu, which means protection or the like. The present project seeks to close the gaps described above. It aims to collect the stock of East Tyrolean place names of Slavic origin, to reconstruct their meaning and to estimate their approximate time of borrowing. This will be done based on a strict apparatus of phonetic changes the author has elaborated. In this context, also Slavic and German accentology is consistently taken into account which up to now has been completely ignored. At the end of the project, we will have detailed knowledge about how long Slavic was spoken in Eastern Tyrol, what kind of living environment can be inferred from the Slavs` choice of names, or how Eastern Tyrolean Slavic must have sounded like. The results are to be published in an online database and will thereby be made publicly accessible.

In the FWF project "Slavia Tirolensis", the Slavic place names of East Tyrol were collected and analyzed according to the latest scientific findings. In the Middle Ages, around the year 600, the Slavs spread towards Central Europe, reaching what is now East Tyrol. During their settlement, they left traces that are still visible today, as in and can be seen in the names of settlements (Prappernitze 'place with ferns'), fields (Daber 'gorge') or buildings (Gomig 'who lives by the stone'). The names were systematically examined for their phonetic development. This allowed conclusions to be drawn about the settlement history as well as details of the Slavic-Bavarian language contact at the time. For example, it was found that the majority of the names were borrowed into German-Bavarian around the year 1000, some of them as late as the 13th century. This in turn means that the Slavic language must have been alive in East Tyrol at least until the periods mentioned. Translation names are particularly interesting because they testify to the fact that the population at that time must have been bilingual to a not insignificant extent: In the municipality of Prägraten, for example, a field called Brochat (from Slavic "proxod" 'passage') lies below another called "Oberer Gang". In the course of the project work, parallels were found for numerous names outside East Tyrol. For example, the microtoponym Katal in the municipality of Matrei is related to the settlement name Hotavlje in Slovenia, as the documentary evidence reveals, and Schrettes in Tristach is a "name sake" of the (also Slovenian) spa town of Čatež. Another special feature of the project is the extensive collection of documents that has emerged from it: over 12,000 documents were collected, dating from the period between the 11th and 21st centuries. Most of the documents were stem from the Tyrolean Provincial Archives, many others from municipal and parish archives. A few mentions were taken from registers. The results of the project work have been published in several articles; the main achievement, however, is a web portal in which the approximately 2000 names covered are listed on an interactive map. The entries include, where available, archival evidence, the respective dialect pronunciation and image files. The main entries (e.g. Daber) also state what the name in question probably originally meant in Slavic. It should be noted that sometimes several interpretations are possible. In the respective secondary entries (e.g. Daberwald) are hyperlinked to the respective main entry (here: Daber) for this purpose. The portal will be available from July and will thus make the Slavic names of East Tyrol accessible to interested parties in a clear and easy-to-use way.