Cybalist
>It's usually connected to the Balto-Slavic root
*val?g-/*vil? g- 'moisture' < *w(o)lg-. It's not clear whether the
Slavic name is original or borrowed from (hypothetical) Volga Baltic.
Trubeckoj argued that the Volga Baltic name of the river wasn't from the
'moisture'-root, but rather from the 'long'-root, thus VB. *€ ¦Ílga '(a)
long (river)'> East Slavic *VU''lga (a
>Sergei
In my observation, most river-names carry the names of ancient
gods - and the proposal seems plausible. On that premise - unless
there is a neighbourhood divinity Vol or similar, I would speculate that
the form "Volga" contains the fairly common w-l/l-w shift and is related to the
god-name Bog. I am not familiar with the history of the Volga's region,
but rivers - particularly long rivers - quite often seem to have carried
different names (or perhaps different dialectal variants of the same name) in
different stretches, the names being applied by the respective
inhabitants of those stretches. I would be interested to know by what
other names this long river was called, in history.
Gordon Barlow