Re: CHAT: Pater Noster in Skuodian

Hello Jan,

> I particularly like the name of the language - Skuodian. It's
> teasingly
> natural! Could you tell something about its etymology?
It is a region in the North-west of Lithuania, centred around the town
of Skuoda (modern Latvian border), which I intend to make Skuodia's old
capital, as opposed to the modern capital, which will most probably be
Palanga.

> I have a few remarks, though.
>
> - jensiik "people" - where does that come from? I associate it rather
>   with "jazyk" (Polish "je,zyk"), meaning "language, tongue".
It is the same word
In Slavonic, though, it did carry the meaning 'people, ethnos'. As you
probably know, not all Slavic languages express 'language' with this
root (cf., say, Ukrainian 'mova').

> - 'sooue' < *suuoue - are all these vowels really vowels? Or
> is the u actually
>   a semivowel, like Belorussian u-grave? In that case you
> might consider to
>   spell it /w/ (a change that I consider applying to Vozgian,
> to decrease its
>   "vowely" character).
As this is supposed to be a mere old manuscript, the exact pronunciation
was unknown. It might as well have been 'w', or for that matter [B],
under Latin scribal influence. We don't know.

> On the other hand, I like "uo" as a diphtong.
So do I :-)

> - Oma priidie kaisarriiko tuojo - same thing. Is "ii" a long
> "i" or a diphtong?
Long 'i'. The diphthong is written as 'ij'. As I mentioned, this is a
Germanic borrowing (probably made by the Finns _before_ the Slavs came),
from some dialect exceptionally close to Gothic (otherwise it might have
been *reik instead).

> - tuojo vs. kad'uodennuoj - I would expect either "tuoj" or
> "kad'uodennuojo"
Oops.
OK, this is a scribal error (read: typo). Read 'tuojo'.

> Did you ever see the Paternoster site? There you can find the
> Pater Noster in a
> lot of conlangs, including three North Slavonic ones
> (Nashina, Seversk,
> Slavëni): http://www.christusrex.org/www1/pater/index-uz.html
Thanks!

> Carry on the good work! More, more!
Uh... I'm having a rush of ideas - I hardly get the time to put them
down! In fact, I spent the whole day at school today alternating between
doing what I'm supposed to do, reading a book on Proto-Slavic and
drawing political and dialectal maps of Skuodia :-) I hope to have a
website set up sometime in June.

Thanks for the kind words,
Pavel
--
Pavel Iosad               pavel_iosad@mail.ru

'I am a philologist, and thus a misunderstood man'
                 --JRR Tolkien, _The Notion Club Papers_