Re: [cybalist] Balto-Slavic gud-

----- Original Message -----

From: Sergejus Tarasovas

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2000 3:55 PM

Subject: [cybalist] Balto-Slavic gud-

 

Dear Sergei,

First, some supplementary toponymic evidence for Baltic *gud- from NE Poland (along the Lithuanian and Belarusian borders):

• Gudabele

(forest), cf. Lith. gùdobelė ‘hawthorn’;

Gudaki (marsh), *gud-āk-ai; Gudalepiec (marsh); Gudarajscys (meadow and marsh), cf. Lith. raĩstas ‘marsh’; Gudziszka (meadow and marsh), *gud-išk-a; Gdakowo (a village near Prabuty, Old Prussian territory); the name seems to be of Baltic origin (*gud-āk-), though Polonised at an early date. In 1285 the owner of the village was a Pogesanian (*pa+gud-j-an-) knight, one Dieterich Stanko.

Secondly, on the Slavic side:

• In the marshy forests near Hajnówka (near the Belarusian border) there is a corner called Gdańsk. My source gives no attestation date, but the city of Gdańsk doesn’t seem to be a likely eponym for this kind of place.
• I have already mentioned Gdów (gen. sg. Gdowa), a town in the province of Cracow.
• Giecz (one of the most important Polish towns in the tenth century, now reduced to a village SE of Poznań) is called Gdecz (< *gUd-Uk-jI) in some of the oldest documents that refer to it. The oblique stem of the latter would have been *Giedcz- > *Gie(t)cz-, generalised in the modern form. The River Moskawa makes the surrounding area very swampy even today.
• The element *gud- occurs also in Czech (Kdyně, cf. Polish Gdynia) and South Slavic toponyms: Gacko (< *gUd-Isk-o) in Herzegovina, Gdinj, Diniška in Croatia (also Croatian gdinjica ‘small wood, copse’).

My interpretation:

Baltic and (to a lesser extent) Slavic show reflexes of *gud-, which played an adjectival function especially in names of woods and marshes. ‘Wild’ (also ‘inaccessible, impenetrable’, and, by implication, ‘swampy; overgrown with bushes’), sems a reasonable reconstruction of its semantic range (gud-obel- ‘hawthorn’ is then literally *‘wild apple-tree’). Some of the toponyms derived from it are analogous to other de-adjectival formations, e.g. *gUd-ynja *‘thicket’ is like *pust-ynja ‘wilderness’ (from *pust- ‘empty’).

I have a private theory about the origin of this toponymic *gud- and its relation to Lithuanian gùdas, but this posting is already too long, so I’ll save the rest for later.

Piotr