Sve:naldr < *svein-vald- 'commander of
young men'. The problem with potential Rugian etymologies is that the
attested names make perfectly good sense in terms of a rather late ("Viking
Age") stage of North Germanic; sometimes they even show distinctively Swedish
features. The Rugians mentioned by Jordanes lived several hundred
years earlier and it's most unlikely that their language should have
developed a whole complex of Old-Norse-like features independently.
Perhaps a residual Rugian group had migrated to the Novgorod area to
become linguistically absorbed by the Swedish colonisers while retaining a
separate name and identity, but that's becoming rather speculative without good
linguistic evidence that the Rus were anything else but Scandinavian. Besides,
the "oarsmen" etymology of the Rus is rather convincing, and Finnish Ruotsi
'Sweden' mustn't be ignored. If there were bitterly competing groups of
Scandinavian businessmen in northern Russia at an early date, they were
perhaps the Svear vs. Gotlanders.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, February 10, 2001 11:12 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: Language - Area - Routes
One more spelling is Sve^naldU. I just discovered this name is
mentioned by Vasmer - he refers to Tosen's explanation: Old Norse Sveinaldr.
Young men's what?
On the other hand, my point of course was not
that these names can't be etymologized on an Old Norse basis. But what do we
know about the language of Rugi? How can it be classified (North, West, East
Germanic)? What if Rugian etymologies, if we only could develop them, would have
suited even better?