Re: [cybalist] River names

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

From: Sergejus Tarasovas

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Friday, April 28, 2000 2:49 PM

Subject: RE: [cybalist] River names

I don't know. Onsets such as *sl- and *kl- are often found as a kind of phonaesthetic signal in "mud/slime" vocabulary. The rivers in question are more likely muddy than glorious, and the homophony with 'fame' may be purely coincidental.

 

BTW, I forgot to ask you what BSl forms you had in mind when you analysed *k'went- 'sacred' as *k'wet- 'bright' with a nasal infix. Surely the Balto-Slavic 'light, dawn, bright' words go back to *kweit-/*kwoit-/*kwit-, not *kwet. This *kweit- MAY be infixed, as in Lith švinta, but this is a different etymon from šventas 'sacred'. Amidst this confusion I began to have second thoughts about Šventoji. I know too little about Lithuanian dialects to assess the possibility that it may be a local development or deformation of earlier Švint-.

 

Piotr

 

Here's if not counterexample then at least a new pearl for your semantics collection: Šlovė^ 'glory' in Central Lithuania, also Слуя in Smolensk district and Словутичь '(sun of) a famous one', an Old Russian epithet of Dnepr.

By the way: there's a (now?) small village on that Šlovė called Šlovė/nai. Looks like a Lithuanian counterpart of Slavic *Slovĕnĕ:*Slov'anĕ? I've been to this village: the river is extremely small (rather a brook), and I feeled nothing Urheimatish :)

Sergei