The place names in Bavaria are a valuable cultural asset, but also a curiosity of the first order. In many areas they are still pronounced as they were in ancient times, which is why they differ considerably from the written form. When listing some examples in the SZ, the name Tschitscherlbach was recently mentioned for the town of Windischeschenbach. A complaint promptly came to the house, which is extremely justified. The letter states that Tschitscherlbach is merely a nickname – a similar case to Kaiwemeran for Kolbermoor and Datschiburg for Augsburg. “The locals only use the word Eschawo,” says the complaint email.
The wide field that has opened up in place name research can be seen from the fact that the scholar Wolf-Armin von Reitzenstein has been teaching this subject for the 100th semester at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. The town of Blindheim in Swabia, where the Duke of Marlborough won a battle against the French and Bavarians in 1704, was always a topic. A reader wrote that years ago a guide at Blenheim Palace in England, which the Duke built with his wages, had once referred to the British’s poor language skills, “which blurred Blindheim into Blenheim.”
Knowing the idiosyncratic pronunciation of the Bavarian Swabians, the reader writes, “I reassured them, because I can well imagine that the residents of Blindheim 300 years ago were more likely to call their place Blennam or something similar, and that the victorious coalition partner would have a clear conscience in Blenheim fought”.
Another reader gave the advice, “If you get into a traffic jam in Oischaun, then the journey to Nuremberg will take longer. Unless the traffic jam on the motorway starts before the Allershausen exit, then you could take the country road.” The fact that the dialectal form has little resonance with the written form of the place name is not only impressive in this case. A reader from Werdenfelser Land said that Saulgrub’s name in dialect was Seigra.
The series could be continued endlessly: Veijda is Viechtach, Pöring is Biang, Frauenneuharting is Freineiding, Inchenhofen becomes Leahad. This phenomenon even exists in cosmopolitan Munich. “We are in Loam at home,” they used to say. No wonder that the Laimers were decried by their neighbors as Loambatzers.