Re: Help with family name, please

"Paul J Kriha" <paul.nospam.kriha@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote ...
John Atkinson <johnacko@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...
"Paul J Kriha" <paul.nospam.kriha@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...
> John Atkinson <johnacko@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...
>> "Paul J Kriha" <paul.nospam.kriha@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...
>> >
>> > I don't believe "vino" and "ve^no" are cognates.
>> >
[...]
>>
>> OK, here we go. In Ukrainian, Slavic "e^" becomes [i] (written >> <і>),
>> while Slavic "i" becomes [y]

(No. Phonetically it's between [e] and [@], unrounded, and much more
front and open than the Russian Ы, which is [i"]. Both are
_transliterated_ as <y>.)

>> written <и>). Thus "wine" is spelt Винo
>> in both Russian and Ukrainian (but pronounced differently), while
>> "dowry" is Вeнo [v'eno] in Russian, but Вiнo [v'ino] in Ukrainian.
>> That
>> is, "dowry" in Ukrainian is pronounced the same as "wine" in
>> (non-akanie) Russian.

(That's not quite accurate. "Wine" is stressed on the second syllable,
"dowry" on the first, no?)

>> Confusing, no?
>
> Right. That's what happens when pronunciation/spelling of two
> or more disimilar words start merging into one, like "rare" and > "rare"
> :-)
> One has to step farther away from Ukrainian to another Slavic
> language group to see what really happened.
>
> It seems that the Vinnytsia community officials are unwilling
> to pay attention to what Vasmer (that dreadful Ruski)

A good Slavic name!

> is telling
> them. Perhaps, if they looked it up in Slovak, just next door,
> it might get them thinking why is it that "dowry" and "vine" are
> two such different words.

Do tell. What does Slovak do with them?

I presume, more or less the same as Czech.
"víno" = vine/wine
"věno" = dowry

"í" and "ě" are not only different vowels. The "í" is long,
while "ě" is short. The lenght matters, it's phonemic.

In OCS, they're the same length, I think. (I guess in OCS you could say that all vowels are "long" except the yers.) But "ě" is more open than "e" -- [&], perhaps. So it's sort of interesting that it's "ě" [&] that turns into [i] in Ukrainian, while "e" [e] remains [e].

(Ok, that "turns into" is probably not accurate. Proto-ESlav would no doubt have split off back when the precursors of OCS "e" and "ě" were still distinguished by intonation, not openness)

For that matter, it's interesting that in Czech (with phonemic length but not stress), the first vowel of "wine" is long, while the first vowel of "dowry" is short. While in Russian (and, presumably, Ukr and OCS) (with phonemic stress but not length), the first syllable of "dowry" is stressed, while the first syllable of "wine" isn't. Long <--> unstressed, short <--> stressed.

BTW, the vowels in "wine" and "dowry" don't merge in any one language, as you seem to be saying in your comparison to "rare". In Russian they're [i] and [e] resp, in Ukrainian [@] and [i]. The only "overlap" is that the Russian "wine" vowel is the same as the Ukrainian "dowry" vowel (phonetically -- and also in the standard transliterations -- but not in untransliterated cyrillic).

There are many words related to either "víno" or "věno".
Their meanings don't seem to overlap which suggests
to me that historically speaking they have been applied
to semantically separate concepts.

[...]

John.

.

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