--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "C. Darwin Goranson"
<cdog_squirrel@...> wrote:
>
> Just to add on a nice tidbit that may or may not aid in this: the Czech
> name for the Moldau river is Vltava. The first two letters look veeeery
> familiar...
http://www.vaidilute.com/books/gimbutas/gimbutas-notes.html
"11 The etymology of Volga as proposed by the linguist Trubetzkoy in
his lectures at the University of Vienna was as follows: in
primitive eastern Slavic, unrounded front vowels changed into rounded
back vowels before a tauto-syllabic l, so that jilga must have changed
to julga; the initial j was lost before rounded vowels in eastern
Slavic, and the initial u acquired an obligatory prothetic v. Thus the
form vulga arose, and short u changed in the 12th13th centuries into
o. So through a long series of changes Jilga became Volga. (Oral
information by Roman Jakobson.)"