The Bakeries of Constance

I love this revealing set of ruminations regarding the origin of the city name Constance from the Schriften des Vereins für Geschichte des Bodensees und Seiner Umgebung, Volume 2:

“The forms Kostnitz and Kostnitz Lake are not the result of some sort of a Slavic influence resulting from the use [of those forms] by the Czechs gathered for the Council of Constance [where Jan Hus was burned down] since already 70 years earlier a report from the year 1353, speaks of Petershausen by Constance.  A noteworthy number of Swabian village names ends with the suffix -itz, without giving any reason to suspect a Slavic origin of the forms of these names. It may be shown with respect to several of those [placenames] how they came – indeed following the laws of the Swabian dialect –  to form their seemingly foreign appearance… The form Kostnitz is nothing other than the Swabian whereas Kostenz is instead the Allemanic version of the name Konstanz –much as for bread Bochenz there occur the Swabian forms Bogatz and Bogitz.”

The author’s sweaty brow produced here an argument that is deliciously telling.

Take his use of the Bochenz/Bogatz/Bogitz (!) example.

Now … bochenek just means – in Slavic – a small loaf of bread. What is the origin of that word?  Well, according to Brueckner, the origin is the German fochenz(e) which, itself, is a borrowing from Latin, focacia. But Brueckner also notes that the German forms as late as the 12th century sometimes appear as bochenze. Brueckner fails to ask however, where in Germany do such forms appear but it appears that such forms appear either in places where Germans ruled Slavs (Silesia, Bohemia) or in Swabia.

(You can look at an article by Günter Bellmann from 1971 to get more on this).

In other words, the author of the above inadvertently penetrating piece, seems to have stumbled upon the solution to the question of what was the difference between the “Swabians” and the “Alemanni”.

Here is a hint for our German friends: one of those tribes really did have nothing to do with the people today referred to in the ES world as “Slavs”.

in unsere alte Heimat hinein

The first historically attested appearance of Constance is in the Ravenna Cosmography about the year 700 in the form Constantia/e – supposedly reported by the wiseman of the Goths – Athanarid who the author of the Cosmography relied on for the geography of these parts along with other Gothic “philosophers” such as Eldebald and Marcomir.  The point, however, is not how the place was named earlier. According to  Ulrich Büttner, Egon Schwär: Konzilarium ze Kostnitz the following were the names of the city:

But the point is not what the city was called originally but that “The form Kostnitz is nothing other than the Swabian whereas Kostenz is instead the Allemanic version of the name Konstanz – much as for bread Bochenz there occur the Swabian forms Bogatz and Bogitz.” In other words the rules of pronunciation of certain names/words seem to be the same for Slavs and Swabians.

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