Re: Bastarni and Slavs (Was: IE & Uralic)

----- Original Message -----

From: tgpedersen

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Friday, January 11, 2008 9:31 PM

Subject: [Courrier indésirable] [tied] Re: Bastarni and Slavs (Was: IE & Uralic)

> > > BTW my mistake about the "Stavani" (I'm working exclusively from
> > > memory): not Pliny's but Ptolemy's. Thus ca. 140/150 AD
> >
> > Yes, it's in his Geographia, III.5.9 STAUANOI, together with
> > GALINDAI and SOUDINOI which two are definitely Baltic. If STAUANOI
> > is indeed a reflex of the Slavic selfname, it doesn't exclude
> > *Slove^ne as a proto-form. Rendering Slavic [o] with foreign
> > (Greek, Gothic, whatever) [a] was absolutely standard in
> > Common Slavic epoch.
>
> ****GK: It's just that Ptolemy's "Stavani" reflects
> nicely the Iranian (and Indo-Aryan acc. to Trubachov)
> meaning "famed", "glorious" (Slavic "Slava"), a nice
> name for elite warriors. Reaching Ptolemy through an
> Iranian (Alanic or Aorsan) filter.****
> >
> > You know ibidem there is another suspectedly Slavic name SOUOBHNOI
> > (VI.14.9), listed together with ALANOI SKUQAI and ALANORSOI, this
> > time with Greek omicron in the first syllable. It has been
> > hypothesized about *Svobe^ne > *Slove^ne, originally from PIE
> > *swe-/*swo- + -bh- "proper", "own" > "belonging to the same kin"
> > (cf. Germanic Suebi). What do you make of it?
> >
> > Of course there is still some chance that both names
> > have nothing to
> > do with Slavs.
>
> ****GK: There is also the Baltic root meaning "slow
> flow" which some have used to interpret "Slavs" as
> "people of the rivers".****

All the proposals for etymology for 'Slav':
http://tech. groups.yahoo. com/group/ cybalist/ message/6463

I think I'll add one.
Holzer/Kortlandt' s proposal for an adstrate in Slavic named Temematic
http://tech. groups.yahoo. com/group/ cybalist/ message/32179
contains:
29. svobodI 'frei' < *swo-bodi- < *svo-poti, Vedic svá-pati- 'sein
eigener Herr', Latin sui potens 'unabhängig';
30. slobodI 'frei, könnend' < slo-bodi < *sl-poti-, OIC salr 'Saal,
Zimmer', OCS selo, Feld, Acker, Ort' etc

That annoys me. I've always mentally connected these two roots as the
same, with a 'fat l' > w vs. 'thin l' alternation. The problem is that
no such alternation should exist at that place in Slavic (I vaguely
recall there's one more example of a Slavic v/l alternating pair, but
I forgot which).

This is the root I want to connect it with: PIE *(s)lew- "loose, free"
http://tech. groups.yahoo. com/group/ cybalist/ message/44457
For the 's mobile' s- another solution could be found in Latin
*se-luo: > solvo:

The reason why such a word would become a Wanderwort was that it would
designate political non-attachedness, independence, recklessness
(because not subject to the force of the law-upholding potentate),
freedom. It would have been borrowed, twice, from a language which had
'fat l'/'thin l' dialect variation, a language which also borrowed to
Thracian (*sw-/*sl- > s-)
http://tech. groups.yahoo. com/group/ cybalist/ message/14332
and from there or from Slavic to Hungarian (with s-)
http://tech. groups.yahoo. com/group/ cybalist/ message/35334

The *swe-/*swo- + -bh- solution suffers from the semantics-free
'extension' -bh-; this solution doesn't. And it is:
*se-leu- "free", *se-leu-o-t- ax "freedom", from which falsely divided
slobod- "free". So "the free people" is what slav- swew- suob- Gr. la:os
http://tech. groups.yahoo. com/group/ cybalist/ message/6463 , 3

etc meant.

Torsten