Alas, Marit2010-01-252010-01-252009Proceedings of the 23rd International Congress of Onomastic Sciences978-1-55014-521-2http://hdl.handle.net/10315/2925Place names can be classified into cultural and natural names. This classification is expedient, because the names change differently as do their referents. The present article is focused on the evolution of the place names of a single parish in Estonia from 1787 through to this day. Although nearly half of the names of either group have not survived, the changes observed across the groups are different. Cultural names tend to be subject to total lexical replacement, whereas natural names are rather replaced partly, change affecting either the determinative or a part of the attribute.enThe following articles are © 2009 with the individual authors. They are made available free of charge from this page as a service to the community under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivative Works license version 3.0. For full details go to http://creativecommons.org.licenses/ny-nd.3.0Estonian Place NamesSaaremaa, EstoniaArticle