On Thu, 21 Sep 2000, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >It was in a book about Indo-European (I don't venture to mention the author, >as I have at least two candidates on top of my mind). The discussion was >about an alledged common PIE root (*wel-, *wol-, something like that) >apparently used to name many unrelated peoples, that had the only common >feature being "neighbors" of the people who called them by that name. > >It seems that Unicode is not very fashionable of this list, lately. :-) >Return-Path: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> also discussed elsewhere: Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 03:11:02 EDT Subject: Re: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sender: Indo-European mailing list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> In a message dated 8/18/99 7:36:25 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: <<"Wallach" is clearly a sort of Latinisation of East Slavic volox- < Common Slavic *volx- (cf. Polish Wloch, Czech vlach, etc.).>> But does this clarify things? 'Wallachia' seems to first appear in German texts. So why in the world would German writers latinize an East Slavic version of a familiar German word that presumably has already been accepted into Western and Southern Slavic? (Doesn't Wallachia looks like it could also be just plain Latinized MHGerman?) If you buy Hall, duNay, et al., then the point of first Slavic contact with the eastern European "Vlachs" is among the Southern Slavs. And place names and early records (according to duNay) suggest that the original form was 'vlahi' in Bulgarian and Serbian. The alternate form 'vlasi' is understood to be a borrowing from Avar or Hungarian 'olasi' (originally borrowed from Slavic), and 'vlasi-" is how 'vlach' occurs in modern Bulgarian and Rumanian. "Vlachi' would seem to be the way the word traveled back north and west. A different issue is when and where the Germanic 'walh' meaning Celtic or Romance speakers or perhaps even Franks, etc., first appeared in Slavic. It would appear pretty unlikely that it would be in East Slavic. It would likely have been as early as the first written appearances of the word, in Anglo-Saxon. In the 700's, Frankish annals were already mentioning Western Slavs as 'ancient allies', and Southern Slavs had already been serving in the Byzantine army for 200 years. One would presume that the word - not referring to Vlachs but to Celts or Romance-speakers - was already established in Slavic by that time. And presumably it was from the form found in AS (walh-) or in OHG (circa 800AD - /uualha/). Under these circumstances, the difference between the early Western and Southern forms (assumedly "valaki" or "volochi" versus "vlahi") may be relevant. But the East Slavic form would seem historically to appear to be later, borrowed from the south or west and somewhat irrelevant to those origins. As far as speaking of a "Common Slavic" form for a word borrowed from Germanic that supposedly was inputed uniformly across 3/4's of a continent of Slavic speakers - from the Elbe to the Ukraine - that seems terribly unlikely, doesn't it? It also seems 'Walh' is unattested in Gothic in the 4th century. Its supposed point of origin is around the Alps and the preponderance of Germanic occurences are in the west. On the face of it, it would look like Western Slavic along the Elbe or in Bohemia would have borrowed the word first and with an earlier meaning and then did apply it to Franks as Romance speakers and perhaps inhabitants of Gaul. In Balkan Slavic, it apparently didn't apply to Latin-speaking Byzantines or Franks, but to a rural Romance speaking population. On first impression, this would suggest that it came there later - after clerical and administrative Latin had pretty much left the Balkans. And that later the specific form /vlah-/ or /vlas-/ bounced back to the west to become 'Vlachi'. The original meaning of 'walh' has of course disappeared from Czech and Polish (as it has for example from Swedish) with national names taking its place, so that the Balkan form referring to "Vlachs" is all that remains. Regards, Steve Long
