Abstrakt
The paper aims to revise an old hypothesis, stated by the prominent Czech onomastician V. Šmilauer (Naše řeč, 1942, p. 172), claiming that names of certain tree species, namely rowans (bot. Sorbus), most likely do not occur in Czech toponymy.
Now with the dictionaries of Czech settlement place names and the 1960s-1980s non-settlement place name collection available, it is possible to examine the issue of trees in toponyms more precisely. Whereas there are really no recorded rowan-related oikonyms, more than 240 anoikonyms motivated by the occurrence of rowans have been documented.
Their lexical-semantical and motivational analysis revealed, among others, these findings: Besides the common noun jeřáb ,rowan', some names (approx. 40 %) include its dialectal variants (žeřáb, žeráb, řežab, řežáb). Most of the names are prepositional phrases denoting objects (mostly fields) according to their location in the vicinity of a rowan tree, a group of rowans or a road lined by rowan trees.