W dniu 2011-06-23 01:23, Trond Engen pisze:
> No, well, I meant the other way around, with (some of) the Vends being
> the Many or the Great Ones or something like that in a language akin to
> Slavic. Probably still not much of an idea, though.
>
The various "Venetic" ethnonyms of ancient Europe are usually thought to
derive from *wenh1- 'love, desire', but this is just a conjecture which
does not have to apply in every case anyway. The etymology of Slavic
*veNt-je/*veNt-jIs^- is not secure either. The suffix is certainly PIE
*-je/os-, but the root *veNt- occurs only in this suppletive comparative
of the adjective 'great'. It looks deverbal, perhaps from something like
*wn.h1-tó- 'nice, agreeable' -- the sort of meaning that is easily
extensible. The Slavic Vyatichi are analysable as *veNt-itji (with a
"patromnymic" suffix comon in tribal names), so an etymological
connection with the classical Veneti is possible, if hard to demonstrate.
Piotr
****GK: It seems clear enough that "Wenceslas/Vaclav/Vyacheslav
" has a sound Slavic etymology in terms of "more fame", and as such has no real connection to the Venet(d)s. What is not (yet) clear to me is that Vyatko is a variant (diminutive?) of Vyacheslav. I would have expected something like Vyatsko or Vyachko. There's no problem with his "brother" Radym (whence allegedly the Rady(i)michi. And there's no problem with the -ichi Slavic suffix in Vy(i)atichi. Standard stuff esp. for early Slavic groups. The patronymic descent label may or may not have been a latter day construction by some Kyivan chronicler. "Vyatko" an ancestor of "Vyatichi" seems adequate in that context. Then I think of the river Vyatka, which looks like a Slavic reformulation of some Udmurtian name ("vu" meaning "water" in Udmurtian acc. to some). And the Vyatichi of history were a Slavic (or Balto-Slavic if the Golyad' of the sources is their sub-tribe), occupying and colonizing Finno-Ugrian territory. One tends to forget that their main
historical city was Ryazan' (which is a Slavic term connected to Erzya (=Mordvinian). Who (or what) then is "Vyatko"? And if it's "Vyatichi" which is then our prime source datum, then maybe it does bring us back to a Vent- label? Which only adds another mysterious "Venetic" issue to the existing pile (:-))*****