This book discusses the interpretation and significance of place names. The many place names that are difficult to interpret today indicate a great age. They are, so to speak, relics from prehistory and can be considered the oldest testimonies of human language. Old written records of a place name often originate from ecclesiastical or notarial documents that were written in Latin. It is not always possible to derive a precise form from these sources, as the writers often used several variants, meaning different similarly sounding forms for the same name.

How reliable are old records? Old writings represent nothing more than an attempt to formally document a place name that had previously been transmitted only orally. Oral traditions, which have emerged from dialects, are older than the earliest writings. They are subject to variations inherent to the dialects and are difficult to capture in a precise form before their final written establishment, especially when they correspond to relics of lost forms of communication.

Many place names that are difficult to interpret today point to forms of communication that lost their original meaning over time and thus were not adopted into the new language. Often, these place names were equated with similarly sounding names that had a completely different meaning in the new language.

The uncertainty and thus inaccuracy of the transition from dialects to cultural languages can be inferred from the various documented linguistic monuments of the Germanic tongue. As can be seen from the dictionaries of High German and Middle High German, the forms contained within them illustrate how uncertain the process of language development was, as it was still in a formative phase.