--- david_russell_watson <
liberty@...> wrote:
I wonder if only 'Dniepr' alone of
> the pair has been correctly etymologized, and if
> those who named it so then didn't live primarily
> to its east. Maybe though, both etymologies need
> to be scrapped?
*****GK: Another point made by Ukrainian linguists re
"Dnipro/Dnieper" is the following: the current Slavic
name of the river has eliminated any sound between "d"
and "n". The attested medieval weak yer could only
have developed from a previous weak vowel. Which rules
out, they think, the Iranic "dan-" as a source, since
the "a" in the Iranic river word is long and not
short. This means that the Slavic term comes from a
language in which "dan-" has a short "a". Which points
to Thracian... The Russian linguist Trubachov
appreciated the point and postulated a Daco-Thracian
intermediary period between the Iranic "dan-" and the
Slavic "d'n". Using Ockham's razor, Stryzhak et al
suggested that there was no need to postulate
anything, and that the Slavic designation was a
metathesis of the ancient "Borusthenes", which, like
"Tanais" must have had a short "Thrakoid" vowel in
"-thEnes" and "TAn-". This is strengthened by the fact
that "Borus" ("Bor-" "Por-") has multiple areal
Thracian affinities, as apparently has the
substitution of "t" for "d". So perhaps the Iranic
etymologies of Dnipro and Dnister really do need to be
scrapped.******
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