Talk:German place names in Alsace

Bad title
This list seems badly titled. Many of these places still have German-language inhabitants, and so their German names are not exonyms. "Exonym" refers only to a name not used by the local population. Chl (talk) 02:07, 25 November 2007 (UTC)


 * I concur. How about German place names (Alsace)? -- User:Docu

Tip to the author
You can find a seemingly decent, pretty complete website on this subject at

http://www.roelly.org/~genealogie/entraide/doerferad.htm (de > fr)

http://www.roelly.org/~genealogie/entraide/villagesad.htm (fr > de)

- in case you'd like to give your article an overhaul.

And if you google in german, you will find more interesting websites on the issue. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 190.112.220.132 (talk) 09:14, 26 March 2014 (UTC)

Should read something like: 'Frenchified' placenames not "French"
Other then placenames like "Bellefosse", "Belmont" and "Cernay" (and one or two others) all of the said French names are in truth Frenchified spellings of the inborn German placenames. Could this be acknowledged on the webpage? It would be informative to show the slight sundriness between 'true' oversets and partial oversets of foreign placenames. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:C7D:411:1600:226:8FF:FEDC:FD74 (talk) 21:32, 18 May 2016 (UTC)

spelling changes
"used from 1870 to 1918 and from 1940 to 1944, when Alsace was annexed to Germany" implies that, apart from these 2 phases, alsace was always french. in fact, alsace was gradually annexed to france in the 17th and 18th centuries and well into the 20th century the population was predominantly german-speaking. as a result, all geographical names (places, mountains, rivers, territories down to the smallest cadastral units) were originally german and still are. there was never a written form of the alsatian dialect, so all geographical names were written in standard german like anywhere else in german speaking areas. after alsace became part of france, the french had the grace to keep almost all the german names in place. but they could not resist to frenchify the spelling. in addition, as a base for the new spelling, they did not use the standard german names but the local pronunciation. thus, mülhausen, alsatian mülhuse, became mulhouse, which closely retains the original pronunciation. the name changes are very systematic only with the odd exception. therefore, what we see today is in most cases kind of a transliteration from german spelling into french spelling. for the standard german endings "weiher", "weiler", "burg", "berg", "hausen", "heim", "hofen", "bach", "ingen" the alsatian pronunciation ("wihr", "willer", "burg", "berg", "huse", "heim", "hoffe", "bach", "inge") were used for the french spelling: "wihr", "willer or villé", "bourg", "berg", "house", "heim", "hoffen", "bach", "ingue"). the german letters "ü", "u", "chs", "k", "ö", "g" became "u", "ou", "x", "c", "oe", "gu"; name additions like "klein", "nieder", "ober", "unter", "alt", "bad" were directly translated into french "petit", "le-bas", "le-haut", "vieux", "le-bains" etc. so, actually, not much changed and it's debatable whether these names are french or still german because they mostly kept their original german/alsatian pronunciation. in only few cases the german names were totally frenchified, e. g. neudorf to village-neuf or schöngrund to bellefosse.Sundar1 (talk) 10:16, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Lorraine?
How about Lothringen?--Kintetsubuffalo (talk) 17:41, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

Exonym
I think the German names are endonyms and not exonyms because they are the original names and not the French ones. Arndt1969 (talk) 08:36, 16 March 2022 (UTC)