It’s always nice to discover a blogging linguist I hadn’t known about [actually I had; see below]; Danny L. Bate (“Linguist, broadcaster, writer, cat fanatic”) has been doing it since June 9, 2020 (I like the way his introductory post lays out “the standard practice among linguists,” so that laypeople can follow along: single quotes for translations, italics for words in a given language, etc.), and his latest post, Vltava, Sázava, Mumlava: A Mumble of Voices Almost Lost, does a nice job of linking local river names to the great sea of Indo-European:
The chief of the rivers that flow through Krkonoše is the Elbe; I’ve previously written about that prince of waterways in great detail. My most recent visit instead inspired linguistic reflections about a considerably less famous river: the Mumlava.
Etymologically, it’s the mumbler (in older German: mummeln; in Czech: mumlat). It by no means ranks among the great rivers of Europe; the Mumlava rises just to the south of the source of the Elbe, mumbles its way for twelve kilometres, then spills out into the Jizera. It wouldn’t be known at all beyond the wardens and fans of Krkonoše, were it not for the Mumlava Waterfall, the largest in the country. […] Given the region’s historical inhabitants, it seems to have been on the basis of the German verb mummeln that the Mumlava was first christened the Mummel. Czech speakers then modelled their own name for it on that German original. This they achieved by adding the ending -ava.
This Czechification of the name brought the Mumlava into line and rhyme with other rivers in the country; there’s the Sázava, the Jihlava, the Úhlava, the Otava, the Oskava, the Opava, the Morava and the Vltava. […] Their common -ava ending was bestowed on the Mumlava, a sort of hydronymic suffix to make it sound like a proper Czech river. The thing is, this ending is not part of Czech’s core of Slavic vocabulary – it’s not something the language has inherited from its prehistoric Slavic origins. Instead, naming rivers with -ava is a later practice that the Czechs-to-be extracted from names already in use when they first arrived in Bohemia and Moravia.
He goes on to describe how Germanic *ahwō ‘river’ “is behind the -ava part of the river’s name,” and how that probably derives from a Proto-Indo-European *akʷā. But “the door is also open to an instance of borrowing”:
This alternative explanation would envision a word, in a language local to central and southern Europe, that was adopted into the Indo-European family from outside. Such an external origin was considered by the scholar Robert S. P. Beekes, for one. In Beekes’ view, *akʷā belonged to the prehistoric language behind so many European river names. It acted as a ‘substratum’ that donated words to the ascendant Indo-European languages. Those words in time became all that remained of it.
I think he explains these things very well (while providing some lovely photos); thanks, Scopulus!
Danny Bate’s been featured here before a few times: British Latin, Thy More Thy Merrier, A Greek Papyrus in Armenian Script.
Sigh. I thought the name sounded familiar, but the thrice-damned Google search turned up nothing…
No mention of Krahe’s Alteuropäische Hydronymie?
The reference to the Elbe as “the prince of waterways” seemed a bit overblown but I had of course momentarily forgotten how small and densely-populated Europe is, which affects the context for how significant a given geographical feature may be. Wikipedia reminded me of the wacky fact that as one of the ongoing consequences of the ill-starred Treaty of Versailles, the Port of Hamburg to this day contains a little enclave controlled by the Czechs (the lease is up soon) where they can exchange cargo between river barges going to/from Prague (up one of the Elbe’s tributaries) and ocean-going vessels without having to deal with the German customs or tariff authorities. (Further upstream the Elbe was once of some historical significance as the point at which the U.S. troops were ordered to stop advancing in order to allow the Red Army to conquer everything on the other side, but then the U.S. troops were subsequently ordered to withdraw further west so the Soviets could occupy even more territory and it thus lost that boundary-marking role.)
I don’t think Bates goes as far as “probably”, only “may well have been”. He puts a lot of hedging on it, for good reason: see Piotr Gąsiorowski on *akʷā, mentioned in discussion here under WAATAR, WATER and other threads.
The aforementioned Vltava.
Massively significant until Czechia joined the EU and the Schengen treaty.
A Water Word that Wasn’t There
Wasn’t there either.
That’s a pretty waterfall, but it’s the kind that can be found multiple times on most streams through hilly terrain. As to the claim that it’s the largest waterfall in the country, VisitCzechia.com informs me it’s 8 meters, while the tallest in the country is the slightly higher 148 meters.
I don’t think Bates goes as far as “probably”, only “may well have been”.
Quite so — that was my overenthusiastic interpretation.
A Water Word that Wasn’t There
This “global etymology” ʔAQ’WA is, of course, nonsense. The etymon is (obviously!) borrowed from Kusaal ku’om “water” (stem ku’a-.)
[No doubt Bengtson and Ruhlen would have added the Kusaal word to their “evidence” if they had actually ever heard of it.]
I looked up Jizera in WP, WP compares the name to French Isère, which (with a reference to Dictionnaire de la langue gauloise by Xavier Delamarre) it derives from an IE borrowing in Celtic. This (IE borrowing in Celtic) made me curious.
The Isère at least strikes me as likely etymologically identical to the Isar that flows through Munich; and that one features prominently on slides 5 and 16 of the presentation I linked to, with another cognate on slide 18.
I’m not sure I like *ahwō > *ava, unless they have a plenty of similar German names.
The mainstream* German outcome is -au: Donau (Danube), Moldau** (Vltava), and tons of others. Au alone, older Aue, today means an occasionally flooded forest along a river, in earlier times also a lush meadow.
* pun not intended
** That’s from the Czech form, though – as I learned from Bate’s post, if the name were inherited, it would be **Wildau.
This “global etymology” ʔAQ’WA is, of course, nonsense. The etymon is (obviously!) borrowed from Kusaal ku’om “water” (stem ku’a-.)
Much as I hate to question the universality of Kusaal/Proto-Balti-Congo, but it’s (equally obviously!) the w-iness that suckling babies learn, as evidenced by *wai-uu “milk” derived from *wahiR “fresh water, stream, river”.
The reference to the Elbe as “the prince of waterways” seemed a bit overblown
My first thought as well. Those of us who have grown up with the Hudson, Mississippi or St Lawrence tend to be underwhelmed by the famous Western European brooks.
The Volga is impressive though.
@DM, basically by this Bate’s sources hypothesise a tendency in local Germanic to derive river names from nouns and adjectives with *ahwō “river”, and I wonder if we have any indication of this tendency other than mediated by Slavic.
Analysable Russian rivers usually are marked with simple ka or some other nominaliser.
Wiktionary says (in *ahwō):
“[OHG]: aha, [MHG]: ahe, German: Ach, Ache (obsolete or dialectal, chiefly in toponyms)”
“tons of others” – I know Dunau and Moldau (and Breslau and Warschau:)) and here au continues four different ow or av sequences from Celtic and Slavic. Given the different meaning of Au < *awjō I wonder if all of them can reflect something Slavic or Celtic.
@Vania, let’s don’t forget about the prince(ss)ly couple of Oti and Volta.
(People also say things about Volta and Niger and even Volta and Congo, but those never touched each other)
That seems weird to me. The only form I know is Aue, the Duden Universalwörterbuch labels the shortened form Au as a South German and Austrian regionalism. And the only present day meaning I know is (again quoting the Universalwörterbuch) “[an einem (fließenden) Gewässer gelegenes] flaches Gelände mit saftigen Wiesen [u. verstreuten Büschen od. Bäumen]” (they also list as a second meaning “Insel”, but that’s one I have never encountered). A meadow with a few trees, yes, but a forest? No.
Also where Roman troops stopped advancing two millenia earlier. When Tiberius Claudius Nero (one of the generals envolved) became emperor, he decided conquering the country between Rhine and Elbe wasn’t worth the effort.
Even if there’s little trace today of a meaning “river” in German, it’s extant in North Germanic (Cont. å, Ins. á), and there are also English hydronyms ending in -ea (vel. sim.).
It would be interesting to sort out which of the -au hydronyms that are real Germanic compounds, which that contain a folk-etymologized first element, and which that are made by adding -au to a preexisting name. Donau, for one, goes in the latter group.
The southeastern distribution might suggest that the rivers were named by North and East Germanic peoples in the Migration Era. (If so, why didn’t they rename the **Podau in Lombardy and the **Ebrau in Visigothia?)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/Dōnawjaz
So, *Dānowyos > *Dōnawjaz > *…auwju
aw as a sequence of sounds (whether understood as a root or not) obtained at step 2 (but partly already here at step 1 in Celtic) and as a word at step 3.
(I don’t know how certain they are about the form of the “Celtic” source and the fact that it is Celtic)
I came across the term “Cruising reels” in an interesting NY Times article about
the decline of department stores.
Here’s the context:
“Even some of the most devoted have fallen away. Tracked down in Scottsdale, Ariz., where she has been for years, Ms. Sabol, the onetime Village Voice reporter who used to live near Bloomingdale’s solely for the proximity, has not been to a department store in 10 years, she told me.
“The internet was not at fault — “Amazon? Please. No. Cruising reels? No,” she said, as if offended by the suggestion. It was what she considered the sterilized atmosphere of the department store itself that kept her away, the lack of possibility and chance, the alienation produced by ever higher pricing. As a ‘psychological boost’ department stores were, as she put it, “no longer hitting it.”
An online search using “meaning of Cruising reels in shopping” yielded only hits on fishing reels.
Online dictionaries were of equally no use. There was no answer in the article comments.
Here is a gift link to the full article: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/29/style/saks-bankruptcy-department-store-shopping.html?unlocked_article_code=1.TVA.-0HB.jYayEkhYNQxQ&smid=url-share
Volta and Niger
The various Voltas are not particularly impressive (particularly not the Red and the White), but the confluence of the Niger and the Benue is awe-inspiring (and I am not easily inspired to awe.)
I am sorry to say that I have never actually seen the Oti (famed in song and story.)
That’s because you’re misquoting “that prince of waterways”.
E.g. Tiroler Ache and numerous rivers in -ach in the region. Also placenames… but not the ones in Carinthia, which are Slovene plural “locatives”…
I was of course thinking of the Donauauen (say that 10 times fast; no [w] allowed); I’m surprised that the pictures I just found of the Elbauen show mostly meadows.
Aue to me is outright biblical. But I’m not surprised it’s current to you – central Germany has missed out on a lot of apocope that has happened both north and south of there, and occasionally that shows up as variation within the standard.
There are places called Wildau, but they all got those names quite recently, it seems (1922 in one case). But I can’t not mention the spectacular personal name Hans-Erdmann Wasmuth Alexander Friedrich Franz Martin von Lindeiner genannt von Wildau. (Sometimes just called Hans-Erdmann von Lindeiner-Wildau, but that’s a redirect.)
Under Au, de.wiktionary has:
“[1] süddeutsch, österreichisch: flaches Gelände an einem Fluss mit Wiesen und Wald
[2] norddeutsch: Fluss oder Wasserlauf, der größer als ein Bach oder niederdeutsch Beek ist[1]”
The reference is “Wolfgang Laur, Historisches Ortsnamenlexikon von Schleswig-Holstein, 2. Auflage, 1992, Neumünster, Wachholtz-Verlag”.
I’d heard of the Vltava in a video by my favorite Hungarian teacher about visiting picturesque Český Krumlov and boating on the river (Moldva in Hungarian). Wikipedia says Krumlov is another Germanic ‑au name, from Krumme Aue.
My two comments above are a little short – also on sense. As drasvi notes, Donau is of Celtic origin – and I didn’t make it obvious that my suggestion for a compound with -au wasn’t to be taken seriously, since I knew the final element is a Germanic folk-etymology of the Celtic suffix. I really meant to raise the additional idea that the southeastern use as a river name suffix could be by analogy with Donau. Apart from that, I do think compounds with forms similar to PN *ahwa, Gothic aƕa, should be considered as source for the Slavic forms.
Also, I didn’t realize how messy the distribution of Au and Aue is across Germany. I understand that the form with -e is from PGmc *ahwijo- and thus cognate with Norw. øy “island” etc. This reminds me that the semantic jump has been bothering me. I see little evidence for any meaning other than “island” in North Germanic – even “island in lake or sea” since islands in rivers aren’t really a thing in Scandinavia.
Also also, shouldn’t influence from Latin aqua be considered for the forms with ch?
There is no question that Au (f.) is from Aue (also f.) with northern (for creeks) or southern apocope of late medieval or later times. Through MHG ouwe and OHG ouwa, it’s from *awjō: first West Germanic consonant stretching to *awwjō; then the ban of *w and *j from the syllable coda, introducing diphthongs into the sound system and resulting in *auwjō; then the final vowel gets reduced and the *j drops out before umlaut spreads.
River names in -a f. (Schwarza, Fischa) are directly from *ahwō with late Bavarian-or-part-thereof loss of word-final /b d g x/ – short /x/ specifically, which is what’s expected here.
Well: 1) I’m not aware of any Latin/Romance use of that word in river names; 2) *k fed into the High German Consonant Shift gives /xː/, not /x/, and I don’t know which one the -ach names and the Tiroler Ache actually have in the local dialects; 3) actually, 2) may not matter, because some forms of *ahwō should have undergone West Germanic consonant stretching. Like… nom. *ahu but gen. *ahhwes or something. There are other such doublets, e.g. shade vs. Schatten (…with shadow originating as a mixture of the ancestors of both). There are rumors of an OHG ahha, though en.wikt and de.wikt don’t have entries for it.
What’s driving me crazy right now is good old Aachen. If it really is from *Aquae Granni, which is not actually attested until after Charlemagne (as the German but not the English Wikipedia article will tell you), why does it have a long vowel? The */xː/ should have blocked open-syllable lengthening. But if we’re looking at a short */x/, from *ahu for real or by folk etymology, why is it still there? It should have disappeared right after MHG. Crazy mixup compromise form? No crazy history mentioned in Wikipedia…
The river Aachen is on, BTW, is called Wurm, which would mean “worm” if it were masculine, but it isn’t, it’s feminine. Wikipedia says it’s related to “warm” somehow, which, like *Aquae Granni, would make sense but is far from documented or even grammatically obvious. The two rivers called Würm make more sense for this (and indeed their Wikipedia articles offer that option), but they’re much farther south, and umlaut blocking by r/l + consonant is a southern thing, not a central one.
I thought prince of rivers was exactly right — in the spirit of all those cute little German principalities with their twee nobility.
@Ryan: maybe “that margrave of waterways”?
According to Deutsches Ortsnamenbuch (ed. Niemeyer) the Standard German spelling Aachen is rather late (1699). It may be as artificial as the ck in Mecklenburg, and the long a a spelling pronounciation. The first German (as opposed to Latin) form found is indeed Ahha (in 972). I have no idea how the dialect form Oche is pronounced (despite having grown up in the vicinity), but I know the adjective Öcher has a short vowel.
The earliest form of the name is the latinized Vurmius (873).
You get the Umlaut in the city name Würselen, but only since the late middle ages (earliest form UUormsalt (870)).
You can’t really say the Aachen is “on the Wurm” — the Wurm just flows through areas that are part of Aachen, but not through the city center. There were other small brooks in the area of the medieval city, but they all have more or less disappeared.
Greule’s Deutsches Gewässernamenbuch says “Grundform (gm.) *Wurma- m.? Onymisierung des Adj. gm. *wurma- ablautend zu ahd. warm ‘warm’”, so why do you expect an ü?.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XRWW8p51lvE
He says der Öcher (with soft ch) but Aachen (~2.50) with hard ch and I think long A. But “Aachen” appears in a story where a youth is meeting an American traveler at the railway station and offers to show him the town.
There are two Norw. rivers named Vorma. The larger of the two is the stretch of river connecting (lake) Mjøsa with Glomma. The etymology is indeed < *varmr, and the explanation is that when the lake freezes over in winter, the circulation changes so that warmer deep water flows out of the lake, keeping the river Vorma unfrozen – probably for longer than Glomma.
But I can say from experience that it doesn’t feel warm. Walking on a bridge over the open river in -20°C is cold.
The etymology of the other river, in Trøndelag, is probably the same, but the reason must be different.
In the case of the river near Aachen, one might suspect the geology.
Well, Aachen is known and named for its thermal springs (it’s officially Bad Aachen).
I know. And even if the water from the actual springs don’t heat the river, I suspect there are other geological effects that might.
Trond, thanks! Analogy makes sense.
I knew that you know it’s Celtic (if it is Celtic and not something else) but I couldn’t understand what you mean.
@DM, I’m a bit confused, by this Fluss oder Wasserlauf, der größer als… meaning alongside with other not very riverine meanings and then by that you reconstruct the modern continuation of Germanic wild river as *Wildau, not *Wildach.
Are there, alongisde with ach or a river names Germanic au river names (other than those where au transcribes some Slavic, Celtic etc. sequence) and could the Germanic source of Vltava be one of such *awjō names – and not *ahwō as Bate thinks?
WP,
about Czech Morava: Moraha in 872
about Serbian Great Morava: from Merehani “an early Slavic tribe who were still unconquered by the Bulgars during the time of the Bavarian Geographer”
about Vltava: Fuldaha in the Annales Fuldenses (872), “from 1113” Wultha, in the Chronica Boemorum (1125) Wlitaua.
wiktionary about Vltava: “However, compare Ltava” (with a link to WP:Poltava).
Ryan, reminded me the complaint of the prince linguist Trubetskoy in Vienna, that it is like “coming to Tula with a samovar of your own” (a Russian idiom: Tula is where samovars are made).
Once I thought the -ava ending must be obviously from Celtic (cf. Welsh afon, Irish abha, abhainn) since the similarity is so striking in both meaning and form. But no, the etymologists link it to a Germanic source with basically no descendants in modern Germanic languages, apart from Scandinavian å. Meanwhile, according to Wiktionary, the Celtic word is related to “ape”.
Etymology can be weird sometimes.
Ever since I found out that the Vltava is Moldau in German, I’ve wondered – what’s up with that M? I understand that the initial consonant cluster would have been tricky in German, but even then I don’t quite get it. (And it seems that the consonants weren’t quite as clustered before the local equivalent of the Fall of the Yers.)
I would indeed have expected **Wildau, or maybe **Woldau or **Wiltau or something
Is this something like Mir/Wir for 1st person plural?
The first vowel of “Oche” is short, fwiw.
I was trying to justify the zero-grade. Suffix stress could do it, so, in analogy to the Vernered *awjō, a *wurmjō could work, and the i in Vurmius looks like that *j. But the two Norwegian Vorma certainly argue that this is all unnecessary.
Yes, but 1) the latter is part of a passage that is in meso-, not dialect, and 2) all forms of machen have a surprisingly long vowel – as long as the somewhat shortened one in the Sprache (in a mesolectal or outright Standard passage) that occurs later, and that one is expected to be long.
Wikipedia says it isn’t – it would get the title immediately if it applied, but it never has. Perhaps figured it’s redundant.
Interesting indeed (and yes, as the article says, it’s still March in German).
Serbian has actually lost a lot of /x/; maybe /ʋ/ was inserted into a resulting hiatus? But the suffix occurs in other rivers in the region as well… perhaps reinforced by the Danube, which is locally Dunav m.
But Czech isn’t supposed to have done any of that.
Heh. In the first, someone in Fulda copied Fulda into it; maybe it actually tells us the voicing of initial fricatives had already started (as other lines of evidence already suggest) despite the maintenance of F. The second looks like a bad copy. In the third, the i might represent *ь, or it might represent palatalization of the l (caused by *ь) that Czech lost much later; either probably makes etymological sense.
Carrying coals to Newcastle.
(German goes full Classical: Eulen nach Athen tragen “carrying owls to Athens”.)
No; that is caused by the -n of the (often) preceding 1pl verb.
If Moldau is attested late enough, the stressed syllabic l of Vltava was already heavily velarized, explaining the o; I want it to explain the m as well, but I have no idea if that works.
And indeed I wouldn’t be surprised if that played a role in some non-northern river names; but it’s not likely to work for the adjective + Au names – they’re all in Schleswig-Holstein.
From the Emil Skála’s article quoted at footnote 5 in the German Wikipedia article on the river:
Der längste Fluss in Böhmen , die Vltava/ Moldau, entspring t bei Ferchenhaid/Bučina im Böhmerwal d unweit der Landesgrenze . Sein Name erschein t zuerst im Jahre 872 als Fuldaha in den Fuldae r Annalen, 1113 dann als Wultha. In der CosmasChroni k liegt 1125 mit Wlitaua der erste Beleg für die tschechisierte Form vor, die auf das germanisch e ”Wilth-ahwa oder -aha „wildes, reißende s Wasser” zurückgeht .
Die alttschechische Form V~bltava ergab die heutige Benennung Vltava. Seit dem 13. Jahrhunder t ist der deutsche Name Moldau (1253 Moltaua) belegt, der aus dem Tschechischen übernomme n wurde . Er entstand durch Dissimilatio n von zwei V-v zu M-v. Der Name multau fl.(umen) erschein t auch auf den Reisekarten von Erhard Etzlaub , die um 1500 in Nürnberg gedruckt wurden und dem regen Pilgerverkehr nach Rom dienten . Die bereits erwähnte tschechische Karte Böhmens von Nicolaus Claudian aus dem Jahre 1518 führt Wltawa rzeka an.
Not going to translate all this, but the intersting part is that Skála says that the form with M- was loaned into German from Czech and there is due to a dissimilation v-v to m-v. On what that assertion is based isn’t clear; he doesn’t adduce any forms with M- from clearly Czech sources, but I assume that the reasoning behind this is that a dissimilation would rather occur in an etymologically opaque name, as was the case in Czech, than in a transparent name, as it was with Wild- in German.
drasvi: I knew that you know it’s Celtic (if it is Celtic and not something else) but I couldn’t understand what you mean.
I meant to handwave gently, in my characteristic learned-yet-self-effacing way, in the direction of cross-contamination between Germanic, Slavic, Celtic, and more. Then I realized that the waving didn’t point anywhere but to my own confusion. But I’m very happy with where the discussion has proceeded!
David M.: And indeed I wouldn’t be surprised if that played a role in some non-northern river names; but it’s not likely to work for the adjective + Au names – they’re all in Schleswig-Holstein.
North Germanic Substrate Alarm! The ON long vowel /á/ as in á “river” passed through [au] (as still in Insular NG and the western fjord dialects of Norwegian) before becoming modern /å/. I don’t know if this is attested in the Danish parts of the continuum, but Jutlandic has some West Scandinavian features anyway.
Emil Skála is a delightfully ambiguous Czechiceloese name.
(How do I write “Czech” in that word? Trying and failing until the edit window closes…)
“they’re all in Schleswig-Holstein.”
I’m still confused. Do we think that the source of Slavic ava names could be
– *ahwō
– *awjō
– both?
I bet it was the other way around. Icelandic has after all diphthongized æ to [ai] as well, and my grandma likes to turn dialectal /ɒ/ into [au] (…so we actually grew up with Or[au]gen) – the standard retains /a/ and /aː/ there.
But of course this could be an independent development of Extreme Southern Danish anyway, so all these Extreme Northern German creek names could be from *ahwō and simultaneously irrelevant to the Moldau.
So am I!
the stressed syllabic l of Vltava was already heavily velarized, explaining the o; I want it to explain the m as well
Er entstand durch Dissimilation von zwei V-v zu M-v
I was wondering about the group of Wacholder, Macholder ‘juniper’ (Machandel, etc.). Is there a treatment of w ~ m in German varieties anywhere more recent than this (L. Sütterlin, Neuhochdeutsche Grammatik mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der neuhochdeutschen Mundarten, vol. 1, bottom of p. 282, the very first thing I found)?
And then there is a river (as well as village) currently named Murafa, however earlier it was Morachwa.
“So am I!”
Thanks! I have recently spent some rtime in a chat where the local jargonism for “an expert” is краевед. German(ic) hydronymy is something where I’m markedly not a краевед, and when you say “so am I” it is informative:)
“Murafa, however earlier it was Morachwa.”
/f/ is a borrowed phoneme in Slavic. It is produced naturally in dialects with /v/ as result of devoicing of /v/, but in dialects with /ʋ/ /ʋ/ can’t be devoiced.
/xʋ/ is one way to pronounce ф “f” in dialects without phonemical /f/.
So it is either Murafa > Moraxva (local pronunciation), or Moraxva > Murafa (e.g. believed by someone to reflect (Romanian?) Murafa)
“Dunav m.”
Which confuses me. Sava and Dunav are the only two Xava rivers I remember myself staring at, in Belgrade, and both are not quite Xavas: Dunav is not quite ava and Sava is not quite X.
What’s ava in Daugava?
and yes, as the article says, it’s still March in German
…the only German translation of that toponym that I’m familiar with is on the 1940s coinage, which translates Čechy a Morava as Böhmen und Mähren.
I had no idea.
!!! !!! !!!
Well, I’m an autodidact; my knowledge is noticeably skewed to what I happen to have found online or in less than 5 books.
Curious indeed. The English Wikipedia article only treats the etymology of Dvina*, but it links to Nacionālā enciklopēdija, which says:
DeepL:
…drumroll…
No attempt is made to explain the suffix; the next sentence lists 14th-century variations of Dvina.
* Final stress. I would never have guessed.
Oh yes, but the river is March. (And Mähren is derived from it – “Moravia” basically.)
Final stress. I would never have guessed.
I wonder why it is strange that the name Dvina has final stress… it seems natural to me, but of course I’m personally familiar with the river.
…BTW, there are actually two of them, the Northern [of Arkhangelsk fame] and the Western [a.k.a. Daugava]. (I don’t know if the names are in fact historically identical.)
AFAIK the Western Dvina/Daugava is considered one of the best candidates for the river Eridanus from ancient Greek ~mythology; this is why I sometimes joke about “Andreapolis ad Eridanum” [corresponding to OTL Andreapol, Tver Oblast – which, unlike e.g. Sevastopol, isn’t actually a -polis etymologically].
I randomly happened upon a suite of waltzes by Julius Fucik, which apparently is commonly known by a double/trasnlated title: “Vom Donauufer” and “Od Břehů Dunaje.” Fucik was a prolific composer, but his international fame rests very heavily on a single piece, “Entry of the Gladiators.” The second of the waltzes in the suite was quite similar in style to “Entry of the Gladiators,” and there were other common points, relating to the choices of rhythm and harmony. However, it was nice to hear a short piece expressing a broader range of Fucik’s stylistic choices.
Oh, it’s gotten better over the years, but I simply still don’t have a fully functioning intuition for East Slavic stress (never mind the cases that trip native speakers up, like the famous Kérenskiy).
I did know there are two; the Western one comes with Devonian fossils, the Northern one with Permian ones 🙂
@DM, I don’t think I could predict the stress of Dviná. But in Moskvá it doesn’t sound totally unusual:)
Vóblya is stressed like “Vó blya!” (an exclamation of surprise) for those curious.
Does the final stress say anything about the etymology of the name as an old compound or e.g. a verbal derivation?
Russian Wikipedia: for Northern Dvina
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Народная этимология объясняет название Двины как «двойная река», поскольку она образована слиянием Сухоны и Вычегды. Эту версию происхождения названия приводят ещё Сигизмунд Герберштейн в «Записках о Московии» (1549) и Александр Гваньини в «Описании Московии» (1578).
М. Фасмер считает, что название на Северную Двину было перенесено древнерусскими переселенцами с Двины Западной. Объяснить его происхождение он затрудняется.
Начиная с Я. Розвадовского, название интерпретируется как индоевропейское, поскольку переход dv- > v- свидетельствует о вторичности финской формы Viena.
А. К. Матвеев считает название балтийским по происхождению и сравнивает его с лит. dvyniai — «двойня, близнецы», либо, учитывая фин. Viena — «Двина», с лит. vienas — «один, единый», то есть «объединённая из двух рек».
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To paraphrase, there are a number of theories:
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1. Folk etymology–from dvoinaja reká (“double river”)
2. Vasmer–named after Western Dvina by Old Russian migrants, but does not give further etymology
3. Matveev-states is Baltic and compares Lith. dvyniai (“double”).
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Finnish Viena is attested, but may be itself a borrowing. The Finnish word or a Livonian cognate is given for the etymology of the Western Dvina in the corresponding Wikipedia article, which also has an Old Baltic etymology for Daugava.
I think only the folk etymology would naturally give accent on final a.
Vasmer has a long article on Двина. His conclusion is “wohl ein alter idg. Name”, then listing the various possible Indoeuropean cognates offered by Rozwadowski and Iljinski. “Abzulehnen sind alle Versuche, eine Verwandschaft mit Дон oder mit двигать nachzuweisen. Unsicher auch Zusammenhang mit got. dauns ‘Dunst’.”
E.M. Pospelov, in his Географические названия мира. Топонимический словарь, oddly divides his discussion between the entry on the river and that on the city named for it:
Oh, nice: “much water” both in Latvian and in local Slavic.
Note, though, how an equation of -ava with “water” is heavily implied but not stated, and how much helpless waffling there is about the earlier-attested forms Duna & Dina even though I can’t see how the German form Düna (complete with Dünaburg for Daugavpils) could possibly be explained except as smoothings of Dvina.
Yeah, he seems to be throwing up his hands to some extent. It’s a mess!
“Much water” looks like the glossing of a river name in North America. What’s the etymology of Lith. daug-? And what’s the etymology of Russ. dial. dvina?
In a region of etymologically opaque but generally Baltic hydronyms, a transparent compound Daugava “great river” (or perhaps “River of plenty”?) would seem comparatively recent. So my modest amount of money would be on an opaque Baltic etymology for Dvina. We might speculate in a root cognate of LG. dün(ing) “breaking wave”, Du. duin “dune” or ON týna “damage, wipe out”.
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Even further afield, Ladoga is supposed to be originally a river name. It’s often explained (e.g. by WP) as a Russian metathetic borrowing of the well-attested ON Aldeigja/Aldoga. The first element may be from a Finnic name of the lake or the river (e.g. ~ Fi aalto “wave” like in Alvar Aalto), but you don’t need to add much tinfoil to see PGmc *agwjō/*ahwō in the suffix(es).
Added before posting: I got the sound idea to check Fi. aalto “wave”. That’s also supposed to be a Proto-Norse loan — into much of Finnic — of aldǭ “dugout canoe, trough”! I don’t know if I believe that.
…Is it even real? daugs is not in lv.wiktionary (or en. for that matter), and searching only brings up the town of Daugai in southern Lithuania. Imaginable IE cognates would seem to be available, though – at least as long as we don’t know the tone of the Latvian word! Baltic is suspiciously absent from the list.
G Düne “dune”, Dünung “all the breaking waves” (mass noun), obvious LG loans.
Lith. daug.
(Derksen)
Both embarassingly missing in Pfeifer. Paul says they’re originally Dutch, and loaned into Low German in the 15th (Düne) and 18th (Dünung) centuries
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Vasmer says “zu lit. daūg ‘viel'”.
Oops. I should have looked for the daudz I posted here yesterday.
The Wiktionary article Trond found confirms the IE origin I guessed; the tone fits!
“Much water” looks like the glossing of a river name in North America. […] Daugava “great river” (or perhaps “River of plenty”?)
Big River
(notable to trivia buffs for winning roger “king of the road” miller a Tony)
I noted in the WP article about Marcomanni:
“On these they placed their women, who, with outstretched hand and in tears, entreated the soldiers, as they went forward to battle, not to deliver them into slavery to the Romans”
Caesar, de bello gallico, about German army taking women into the battle to discourage retreat.
I remember reading same about Arabs (https://www.jstor.org/stable/529016, pp 262-263). I wonder how common it is.
Danny Bate in this post quotes his post in twitter, with a cat saying eau (mispronouncing the difficult French sound [o]*). Does he mean he invented this meme (this specific cat illustrating one-vowel labialised words from various languages)?
I saw (or saw and remembered) this cat for the first time a month ago, and then two weeks ago.
*I find it easier than French sound [a] as in la camarade, the first French word in the Soviet French textbook I leafed through. I’ll try not to forget, when I meet a French woman next time, to address her thusly.