Re: [tied] Thracian place-names

george knysh wrote:

> ****GK: The second part of the hypothesis has to
> overcome the "short a" problem. This does not exist if
> one holds that the Slavs got the river name from the
> Thrakoid population they assimilated in this area, and
> with which they were immediate neighbours
> earlier.*****

There's no "short a" problem. In that part of NE Iranian *a: was
shortened pretty early; it attracted stress and resisted elision because
of its former length, but otherwise it was just short *a. It is short in
Modern Ossetic, too.

> *****GK: Stryzhak and Bilets'kyj mention this view
> (op. cit., p. 14-15) but feel that the expected
> Hellenized version should have been *ouru. Cf. A.O.
> Bilets'kyj, "Borysthenes--Danapris--Dnipro", in
> Pytannja toponimiky i onomastyky, Kyiv: Akademija Nauk
> URSR 1962, pp.54-61. *****

*<ouaru> or *<ouoru>, more like, but in fact a foreign [v] or [B] could
certainly be substituted by Gk. <b> (remember the Blakh- discussion?).
(cf. Latin Danubius/Danuvius, or the hesitation between <x> and <g> for
foreign [h] in Modern Russian). There were no strict rules, just
individual scribes' preferences for a given graphemic representation of
a foreign sound.

Piotr