Materials for an Etymological Database of North Lechitic Dialects

This work presents comparative data from a short monograph on North-Lechitic accentology (Bogatyrev 1995) focusing on partly extinct Slavic dialects of Pomerania: Slovincian and Kashubian.

The most detailed description of a Pomeranian dialect, the “Slovincian Grammar” and “Slovincian Dictionary” by Friedrich Lorentz (Lorentz 1903; SW), documented several closely related idioms spoken at the time by a few hundred people. Lorentz’ transcription represents phonetics of a dying language with amazing precision but is difficult to read and reproduce, a factor that may explain slow pace of adoption of Slovincian and, to a lesser extent, Kashubian material in comparative studies. However, some of the archaic features, most notably, mobile stress, piqued curiosity of several scholars resulting, on occasion, in radical hypotheses that were difficult to verify without a sufficiently broad data set and consistent representation. With this in mind, I attempted to produce a systematic overview of North-Lechitic accentology supported by representative lexical material. As one would expect, Slovincian stress patterns turned out to be coordinated with the existing reconstruction of Proto-Slavic accent, although not as clearly as earlier data from South and East Slavic manuscripts investigated by Vladimir Dybo, Andrey Zaliznyak, and their students. Combined with another archaic feature, the distinction between so-called “narrow” and “non-narrow” vowels, North-Lechitic proved to be a useful resource confirming and, in some cases, clarifying existing accentological reconstructions. However, it occurred to me that, while somewhat helpful in accentological research, the book’s material might be more effective if it were recast as a mini-etymological dictionary, a companion to the existing, much larger collections of comparative data, such as Rick Derksen’s Slavic etymological dictionary (Derksen). A narrow focus on a particular group of dialects may help identify accentological and phonemic peculiarities that are less prominent in a broader etymological study.

Last but not least, this publication provided me with an opportunity to correct several errors and omissions. In addition to typos in a few etymological entries, they include missing bibliographic items, most unfortunately, a reference to Križanić's grammatical treatise (Križanić 1859), as well as incomplete and occasionally erroneous rules that explain correspondences between Lorentz’ transcription and my simplified spelling. I take this opportunity to apologize to the readers and publishers of the original text for unintentional confusion that this may have caused.

On a more pleasant note, I would like to acknowledge generous assistance from Philipp Krylov and Dr. Sergey Krylov who helped convert the original manuscript to a modern word processor format, Dr. Tijmen Pronk who reviewed South Slavic material and corrected errors in Slovene forms, and Professor Alexander Lubotsky for support and guidance. I am indebted to my colleagues whose help was instrumental in the publication of the original book, most importantly, to Dr. David Birnbaum, Sergey Bolotov, Dr. Rimma Bulatova, Dr. Vladimir Dybo, Dr. Vyacheslav Ivanov, Dr. Werner Lehfeldt , Dr. Sergey Nikolaev, Dr. Reinhold Olesch, Dr. Hans Rothe, Dr. Adam Suprun, and Dr. Andrey Zaliznyak. I take this opportunity to thank Biblion Media, the publishers of Slavistische Beiträge, for their kind permission to translate and reproduce parts of the original text.

Oceanside, California, September 2017