Linguistic Interrelations in Early Rus’: Northmen, Finns, and East Slavs

Description

This book is a major contribution to the study of East Slavic linguistics and to the scholarly controversy regarding the beginnings of Rus’ that has existed between the so-called Normanists and anti-Normanists for more than two centuries. In six previously unpublished linguistic-historical essays adopting an interdisciplinary, comparative approach, Dr. Strumin’ski, an avowed Normanist, discusses the role of the Northmen in the rise of the East Slavic linguistic group; the system of Old Nordic as reflected in Old East Slavic and other languages; the system of Old East Slavic as reflected in Old Nordic; interrelated Old Nordic and Old East Slavic onomastics; mutual Old Nordic and Old East Slavic lexical borrowings; and Old East Slavic and Finnic linguistic contacts.

The largest section of the book deals with Old East Slavic onomastics. There the reader will find valuable information on the origin and early history of the term Rus’; on East European river names and place names in Old Nordic; on the gods of the Rus’; on the Old Ukrainian, Old Nordic, and Khazar names of Kyiv; on the origin of the names of the Dnipro Rapids; and, in particular, on the ethnic makeup of the Rus’ elite as reflected in personal names. A fifty-page index contains thousands of Baltic, Caucasian, Finno-Ugrian, Germanic, Greek, Sanskrit, Iranian, Romance, Semitic, Slavic, and Turkic words and names that appear in the book.

Linguistic Interrelations in Early Rus’ will be of interest not only to specialists, but also to anyone interested in the origins of Kyivan Rus’ and of Ukrainian and Russian personal and place names. This book is copublished with La Fenice Edizioni (Rome) and constitutes volume two in its series Collana di filologia e letterature slave.