Re: Odp: Balto-Slavic Bear

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 941
Date: 2000-01-16

 
----- Original Message -----
From: Gene Kalutskiy
To: cybalist@eGroups.com
Sent: Sunday, January 16, 2000 8:20 AM
Subject: [cybalist] Re: Balto-Slavic Bear

"piotr gasiorowski" <gpiot-@...> wrote: 
original article:http://www.egroups.com/group/cybalist/?start=933
> If the above etymologies stand up to scrutiny, the Proto-Balto-Slavic
bear may be reconstructed as *rCtas, yielding Slavic *UrstU and Baltic
*irštas. PIE bears may still be lurking in some unexpected places.

Congrats, Piotr! That looks like a bull's eye. Now, what do you think
of Russian "Orsha" (name of a town near Moscow) - could that have
developed from *UrstU?
Don't think it could. I'd expect something like *vorst- for Russian, derived from *wUrst- with an onset-filling glide. If we pose *st (rather than *s) for Slavic, it would give Russian shsch, not sh, when palatalised. One could try to etymologise names like Vorsma (not far from Nizhni Novgorod) with the help of *vorst-, but I suppose other etymologies have already been proposed. You must bear :) in mind that *wert-/*wrt-/*wort- 'turn' and *wers- '(hill)top' are very common elements in Slavic placenames, and that the former also occurs in Slavic bipartite personal names. it may be impossible at times to distinguish them from etymological *vorst-.

I don't think I'll be saying anything new, but I know it's "berloga" in
Russian. 'Ber-' probably comes from the same root as "buryi"=brown (as
in "buryi medved'") - either from the time of the German-Slavic
schpachbund (which, I think, you continue to question) or
independently, while '-loga' seems to be from the PIE *legh-/logh- (as
in Russian "lozhe", Spanish "leche" = 'bed, resting place').


This is exactly what I had in mind when alluding to a a Germanic connection. The only problem is that the PSl reconstruction must be *bIr-logU. The *logU part causes no problems and is amply attested in Slavic (also in the form *legU, as in Polish nocleg 'a place for spending a night' < *nokti-legU). But *bIr is more troublesome, especially as there in no composition vowel (as if it were a root noun), which would suggest an extremely archaic compound (not that Slavic has no such compounds, in fact *medhu-ed- is one of them, and *dus-dju- > *dUzdjU 'rain' is another). Direct comparison with buryi is impossible because of different vocalism (*bour-o-). If one could convincingly argue that a pre-Proto-Slavic (Balto-Slavic?) *bhr-s (the same root which gives the "beaver" word when reduplicated) existed as a euphemism for a bear, the etymology would be very satisfactory indeed. But the alternative possibility is that the whole word is a rather late loan from some Germanic language in which the vowel of "bear" was high enough for a yer to substitute it (something like *ber(o)-laga- would probably do).
 
BTW, I've never questioned a Germanic-Baltic-Slavic Sprachbund. I do question a branch with such members. In the techical jargon of historical linguists a Sprachbund (a.k.a. language league) is not a genetic unit but a convergence area within which even languages which are distantly related or exhibit no genetic relationship may influence each other as a result of long-standing bilingual contact. One famous example is the Balkan League grouping Bulgarian, Macedonian and southeastern Serbian dialects (all Slavic), but also Romanian and extinct Dalmatian (both Romance), Greek and Albanian (separate branches). I've always claimed that the IE languages of the North European Plain formed a Sprachbund in this sense. Shared vocabulary is symptomatic of that.
 
Piotr