Re: Another group of "Veneti"?

W dniu 2011-06-23 17:18, george knysh pisze:

> ****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 (:-))*****

I have little doubt that Vyatko as an eponymic protoplast is a popular
rationalisation of the tribal name. Though *-itjI is best known as a
patronymic suffix, it is also common in ethnonyms of varied origin
(Krivic^i, Dregovic^i, Ulic^i). It's possible that the original name was
*veNti and the suffix was added after the legendary ancestor had been
invented, strengthening the folk etymology. Note that the name of the
West Slavic Veleti most likely meant something like 'the mighty ones'
(related to *velikU, *velIjI, containing PIE *welh1-).

Which said, my gut feeling is that the Germanic *winiTa-/*winiDa-
terminology was transferred from some non-Slavic "Veneti" to the Slavs
after the Great Migrations, the way that *walxa- was trasferred from the
ancient Volcae to the Welsh, and then to Italians (Welsche), Romanians
(Vlach) etc.

Piotr