W dniu 2012-09-05 11:45, Francesco Brighenti pisze:
> > Why would the same word develop in Polish into both <Odra> and
> > <wydra>?
>
> That's a good question! Yet, don't expect people being only driven by
> religious fanaticism and by a nationalistic-cum-chauvinistic agenda to
> be able to reply to it.
LOL, Francesco, whatever fanaticism motivated such official publications
in post-war Poland, it certainly wasn't religious. There was an
anti-German agenda, no doubt about that, and it made many placename
specialists concoct questionable etymologies to "demonstrate" the
ancient presence of Slavs in areas that had been transferred from
Germany to Poland in the aftermath of the war. There is of course no
connection between Slavic *vydra (from *udrah2) and the attested names
of the Odra (the oldest documents, from the 9th c. onwards, have
Od(d)dera, Odora vel sim., but there is some indirect evidence that the
medial vowel is epenthetic). A connection between <Odra> and "Old
European" hydronyms like <Adra> is possible but hard to prove. There are
speculative proposals linking <Odra> to Avestan aðu- 'canal,
watercourse', since quite a few *-u- stems have *-ro- variants, but it's
again a mere possibility. Ptolemy's <Ouiadoua> (*wiadwa?) could then
represent something like *wi-adu- (or even a dissimilated *dwi-adu-)
'branching watercourse' -- if we could only be sure that it referred to
the lower course of the Odra.
Piotr