Re: [tied] Re: The Birds - etymology found

Some of them are no doubt Greek names of "international" currency. It's easy to see that "finist" or "grifon", for example, can't be Slavic (with their f's that can't be derived from anything Proto-Slavic). Stratim, however, looks 100% Slavic to me, while mogol (and maybe nogai) might have been inspired by Mongolic or Turkic folklore (though this is just an impressionistic guess). Gamayun sounds quite enigmatic; I wonder if it isn't of Indo-Iranian origin. I'll try to help, but it will take a little research.

As far as I know, none of these birds occurs in West Slavic folklore (except for obvious western borrowings like "gryf" < Latin gryphus "griffin", the heraldic beast of the dukes of West Pomerania).

Piotr

----- Original Message -----
From: m_orelskaya@...

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Saturday, October 21, 2000 7:37 AM

Subject: [tied] Re: The Birds - etymology found

They are not the original characters of Slavic mythology then? All these birds are found in the old Russian literary source "Golubinaya kniga" and in the Slavic myths as reconstructed by A.Asov. I am interested in the etymology of the names themselves. It appears to me that while some of them are possibly corrupt Greek words (alkonost - halcyon, finist - phoenix etc.), the others could be of Slavic origin (stratim (which is also called nogai/nagai), mogol, gamayun). What would experts in the Slav languages say? Regards, Marina Orelskaya Dr Marina Orelskaya c/o Department of Sanskrit and Prakrit Languages, University of Pune, Pune 411007 India