Accent of some Slavic theonyms

Jim Rader jrader at m-w.com
Thu Apr 22 12:09:48 UTC 1999


Dear Seelangers--

My employer, Merriam-Webster, is cooperating with Encylopaedia
Britannica on a one-volume encyclopedia of world religions.  Our
share of the work includes providing pronunciations, in dictionary
respelling style (not IPA), of the entry words. The encyclopedia has
short articles on a number of pre-Christian Slavic deities, and the
pronunciation editor has asked my help in providing pronunciations.

Most of the deities are taken from a few passages in the <Povest'
vremmenykh let>, and I can conjecture haphazardly enough on the
phonetics of the vowels and consonants.  Stress poses a problem,
however.  Do people who teach or lecture on early Slavic
religion/culture have some sort of communis opinio on the stress of
these names?  Vasmer stresses some, though not all of the <Povest'>
theonyms, and I'm happy enough to go along with his placement of
stress (though I really don't know how he came up with the stresses,
seeing that these texts, if I recall correctly, were not accented).
The following are unstressed in Vasmer:

Dazh(d)bog - Presumably on the 2nd syllable if parallel to <Stribog>,
which Vasmer stresses on the last syllable.

Svarozhich - a patronymic from <Svarog>, which Vasmer stresses on the
2nd syllable.  The stress of <Svarozhich> would presumably depend on
whether <Sva'rog> was end-stressed throughout its paradigm (hence
<Svaro'zhich>) or had fixed stress (hence <Sva'rozhich>).  Any
opinions?

Mokosh - a modern Russian derivative is <moko'sha>, which Vasmer
defines as "domovoy v obraze zhenshchiny s bolshoy golovoy i dlinnymi
rukami."  If <moko'sha> belongs to the mobile paradigm, then
presumably <'Mokosh>, if end-stressed then <Mo'kosh>.  But I can find
nothing on the accentual pattern of <moko'sha>.  Do any native
speakers of Russian (or Ukrainian or Belarusian) have intuitions on
how this noun is stressed?

Any thoughts on the pronunciations of these names would be
appreciated and acknowledged.

Jim Rader
Etymology Editor
Merriam-Webster, Inc.



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