Abstract
Toponyms are an important part of our cultural heritage and are thus more than names, they also encode history. Flurnamen, or microtoponyms, are names given to natural features and they have been argued to be relatively closely linked to properties of landscape. In this paper we analyse a large databases of microtoponyms using a mix of linguistic information and simple text analysis to explore patterns of naming of natural features in the canton of St. Gallen in Switzerland. We observe that meaningful elements grounded in descriptive cultural and natural readings of landscapes are common, and that usage of microtoponyms closely follows Zipf’s law.
Villette, Julia