From Variant Place-Names to Machine-Readable Borderlands: LLM-Assisted Extraction of Slavic Toponymy in Livonia before 1700

This paper presents an experiment in using a commercially available frontier LLM to extract, normalize, and critically verify Slavic toponymic evidence for Livonia and its adjoining eastern Baltic borderlands before 1700. The corpus belongs to a transitional manuscript and early-print ecology, in which Latvian and Estonian vernacular textual traditions remained comparatively sparse while German, Latin, Polish, Ruthenian, and Russian documentary practices intersected.

The Slavic evidence comes principally from three early modern traditions—Middle Russian, Polish, and Ruthenian—with a smaller Old East Slavic chronicle layer. Place-names survive in chronicles, legal acts, boundary descriptions, maps and atlases, and later editions of manuscript material. The workflow combines candidate extraction, scholarly transliteration, separation of attested historical forms from modern translations, geographical filtering, duplicate detection, and comparison with an existing historical-toponymic database. The current working table contains 538 attestations and preserves uncertain identifications, competing normalizations, and editorial decisions.

A preliminary normalized-Levenshtein analysis asks whether orthographic affinity between Slavic forms and German or modern local comparison forms varies geographically and by source tradition. Aggregated by identified place, Slavic forms are significantly closer to German comparison forms in Estonia (paired p=.003) and the Daugava corridor (p=.028), while northern Latvia shows no comparable asymmetry. The balance between German and local affinity also differs significantly among Middle Russian, Polish, and Ruthenian groups (Kruskal–Wallis p=.004), with Polish forms showing the strongest German affinity. The smaller Old East Slavic layer is treated separately.

The paper examines LLM failure modes including hallucinated identifications, over-inclusion, confusion between ethnonyms and toponyms, and false equivalence between historical and modern forms. The LLM serves as an interface for querying a fragmented multilingual archive under explicit linguistic control.