Abstrakt
For well over a century, scholars have endeavored to identify and explain the oldest place names of northern Bavaria, particularly those with a Slavic origin. Taken together, the places in question comprise the area of so-called Bavaria Slavica, which is presently undergoing systematic interdisciplinary investigation.
To this end, the results of numerous philological name studies must first be converted for quantitative use, entailing manual adaptation to standardized schemas and cataloguing of the morphological components of each toponym. I have devised solutions for several data-structural challenges in this connection, including: multiple names given to a single geographical object, the embedding of one name form in another, names combining elements from multiple languages and degrees of certainty among etymological proposals.
In conclusion, I discuss examples of how the toponomastic data may be interpreted historiographically. The examples pertain to the frontier specified in the Diedenhofener Capitular (805/806) and the differentiated areas of Slavic settlement connected to the Sorbian and Czech languages.