"christopher gwinn" <
sonno-@...> wrote:
original article:
http://www.egroups.com/group/cybalist/?start=1222
> I have often wondered about possible Celtic borrowings in the
Baltic, and this one definitely has me wondering:
>
> The 13th century Volynija Chronicle mentions a Lithuanian divinity
named Diviriks - the name has not been translated in any of the sources
I have read, and has been labelled "mysterious" (the name might be a
byname of Perkunas). I know that if the name is broken down into
Divi-riks, the second part of the name seems to look like a relative of
Gaulish Rix - which shouldn't naturally exist in Lithuanian.
>
> The name grabbed my attention because there is a Celtiberian name -
likely a divine name - Deiuoreiks "God-king" (Deiuo "god" reiks
"king"). Is it possible that Diviriks is the same name, borrowed by the
Lithuanians - perhaps through a Germanic source - or can it be possible
that Celts might have entered the Baltics during their time of
expansion in the Iron Age (I am thinking also of a classical author -
need to look the name - who claimed that soma people in the Baltics
spoke the same language as the British - it is likely just a false
story - but could there be any truth to it at all?).
>
This is a possibility. The most simple explanation could be within
Baltic itself. Lith. Dievas, OPrus. Deiwis, as for the Rix - Rikijs
is attested in Prussian. It is supposedly a borrowing from Gothic,
which would be justified by their cultural relations with the Goths. It
is likely that Rikis could have entered Lithuanian - archaeology shows
that similar trends in the material culture stretched from Prussia to
the Lithuanian highlands (which were the first to come in contact with
Russia). The lowlands, on the other hand, created a common cultural
group with the Curonians. In that way, the presence of Rikis is
possible in Old Lithuanian because of Prussian. Later, it must have
been replaced with Slavic borrowings. Actually, rikis is used in the
modern Lithuanian language as "knight" or "ruler", but I think it is
only there as a historical word, "artificially" brought in from
Prussian in the 19th century by various writers.
I've always thought that there must have been some contact between teh
Bqlts and Celts, at least in the bronze age, when the Celts, too, were
involved in some of the amber trade. I think it was tacitus who
described the Aestians and compared their language to that of Brittain.
He said that they called amber - 'glesum'. It is an interesting
question, why, even though there must have been some cultural exchange,
no Celtic borrow words survived in Baltic to this day. The origin of
the Prussian "rikijs" could be, in this way, questioned. It since the
accent is on the second syllable, it seems to me that it is most likely
a Gothic borrowing, and not Celtic. (Rikijs < Rix seems unlikely, it
would have been Rikkis). Perhaps there is a different hypothesis. I
really do wonder if there might be any Celtic borrowings in Baltic. It
is most unfortunate that I do not have the etymological dictionaries of
Old Prussian. That's the most archaic one of the Baltic langauges,
though there is a hypothesis that the one recorded around Koenigsberg
was only a Soudovian slang of the Prussian language (cf. phonetics in
the Elbing glossary).
Martin