Polonization of Prussian toponyms in the light of language contacts

Blažien, Grasilda

doi:https://doi.org/10.17651/ONOMAST.65.1.6

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Title: Polonization of Prussian toponyms in the light of language contacts

Abstract:

The coexistence of the Balts, namely Prussians, and Poles, began quite a few centuries ago, and we cannot give the precise date when the first contacts between the two nations were established. Most likely, it happened earlier than the first attestations in historical documents appeared and their lan - guage systems also came into contact with one another. One of them, the Prussian one, only left a lim- ited written legacy, yet several thousand Prussian proper names were scattered across all the lands inhabited by Prussians and recorded in a number of the documents of the Teutonic Order. Prussian toponyms used to be Germanized, and those Germanized forms outlived Prussians themselves. The processes of Polonization rested upon the Germanized Prussian toponyms and often on the Prussian model itself. It is a fact that Prussians inhabited the areas of present-day Poland and the Kaliningrad Region. The Prussian-German-Polish life in the same lands determined language contacts and the processes of toponym integration. Onomasticians specializing in the proper names from those areas should exhaustively describe the processes of onym adoption from one language system to another by not forgetting one of the key tasks in historical onymy, in-depth attestations of every place name under analysis in the most reliable sources, i.e. manuscript documents. Onyms travel from one lan- guage into another by leaving their traces in the authentic form, which is of great value for the deter- mination of reliable etymology. Onyms are reliable witnesses of the actual reality of that time and history. The statements are illustrated by the examples, which have not been found or they were interpreted differently in the works of Polish onomasticians and significant collections of toponyms.