Volga

[Alexander Sitzmann]

Well, it seems that I have to defend my etymology, and it will be a pleasure
for me:

1. Dear Mr. Gribble - is it that plausible that the Balts named the Volga
"the long river"? Why not the Dnepr or the Dvina? If Volga is a baltic
loanword, we're talking about the 6th/7th century, and as far as I know it
took even the Vikings a lot of time to reach the Caspian Sea (by the way, my
monograph on language contacts in EarlyRus' will be published this or next
year in Vienna). I do not believe they compared all the rivers concerning
their length. Isn't it as plausible to think, that the ones who named the
river thought about the fact, that the Volga is in fact a system of
waterways with lots of water in it? From a semantic point of view it seems
impossible to me to solve the etymological problem.
And I'm not that sure either, that il- > 6l- > 7l- > v7l- > vol- fits in
with what we know about historical phonology (the example wolk doesn't prove
too much because there's no prothesis, compare protogerm. wulfaz, goth.
wulfs, lat. vulpes, sanskrit vr:kas... with or without svarabhakti vowel).

There are some things, I'll try to point out:

2. Dear Mr. Gladney, now something about the svarabhakti-i:
There are lots of examples for a svarabhakti-i, compare e.g. skr. uzeti 'to
take' and uzmete 'you take' - how would you explain the alternation? In fact
in protoslavic there was no alternation : wuz-m:-t_ej > wuzint_ej > v7zeNti
(the front nasal voewl is only possible in combination with i or e, mt>nt
needs no explanation) while wuz-m:-ete > wuzimete > v7z6mete > uzmete.
Another example: vr_es*ti 'to tie' and vr6zete 'you tie', in protosl.
werst_ej and wr:-zete (the same with vr_es*ti and vr6z*ete 'to throw') or
protosl. smardu > ocs. smrad7 and protosl. smr:-d_et_ej > ocs. smr6d_eti 'to
stink'
or protosl. gramu > ocs. grom7 and protosl. grm:-_et_ej > gr6m_eti 'thunder'
and so on.
There are only few cases with svarabhakti-u, in fact I remember only one:
preprotosl. gwenete > protosl. dz*enete > ocs. z*enete 'you hunt' and
preprotosl. gWn:_at_ej > protosl. gunat_ej > ocs. g7nati. In this case it is
very probable that the context (labiovelar) caused the u instead of i.
I'll have to look up your Polish example (i.e. find parallels and think
about
it), but I'm quite sure, that this is a question of context.

3. Now to the main point: v-prothesis
We have examples for this prothesis, which occurs only (!) before
long or short u; the v-prothesis is postprotoslavic, the svarabhakti-i is
preprotoslavic, in the protolanguage there were no syllabic consonants.

Two examples for v-prothesis:
lat. Urs_aria(m) > Wurs_arju > V7sarj6 (velar vowels are palatalized after
palatal consonants) > Vrsar (in Istria).
lat. _Utus >_Utu > W_utu > Vyt7 > Vit (in Bulgaria)
[There were no jers in the protolanguage (this model fits in with the
material we
have from loans into and from germanic, baltic, uralic, greek and romance
languages) - i.e. "my" protolanguage is not the one gained by internal
reconstruction.]

There are no examples for v-prothesis before i (!) as far as I know; this
means *in > v7n is a singularity another "Isoglosse" - (an interesting one
in fact, compare the word final rules as e.g. Gen. Pl. t_eles7 < t_ele-s-om
and others). If now someone postulates,that this v-prothesis occurs before
il- this is rather ad hoc (nota bene: in- and il- are different contexts),
because he can hardly find other examples. Of course he could postulate
another singularity, but in this case we have another explanation (with
rules that are recurrent with other examples) - a palusible explanation.

Therefore Volga = 'the big water, the very wet one...'.

Sincerely,
Alexander Sitzmann

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