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The paper offers a reinterpretation of a few phonetic changes, which mostly have been treated as simple adaptation processes whereas at least some of them reveal phonetic trends either in Bulgarian or in Turkish dialects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on the etymologic analysis of Bulgarian place names containing Шаран- / Саран- stem. The version of Bulgarian linguists on their antroponimic origin is vindicated. The personal name (either surname or byname) Шаран / Саран exists in most Slavic languages and Шаран is considered to be its secondary phonetic variant. The transformation of the anlaut С- to Ш- is explained in the linguistic research by the closeness of their articulation. Also not excluded is the phonetic tendency of appearance of the second focus – lingual – in the Indo-European *s, i.e. sibilant element of articulation (R.M. Kozlova). It is argued that surname Саран could be motivated by the fish name саран 'carp' ‹ *saranъ ‹ *sarati, *sariti with the initial meaning of 'variegated', compare various surnames based on fish names in the Slavic languages. Other etymologic versions of the origin of the fish name, in particular Turkic or Slavic and Turkic hybrid versions are treated quite critically. Early Slavic *Sаrаnъ is related with *Sаrеnъ, *Sаrinъ, *Sаrоnъ, *Sаrunъ, *Sаrуnь and other names reconstructed through the antroponymic material of the Slavic languages. This is an extra argument to support the Slavic origin of the above archetype. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with possible traces of the Indo-European adjective suffix *-ṷent- / *-ṷn̥t- in the onomastic remnants of Thracian and Slavic languages, some of them already assumed by Vladimir Georgiev (*aps-ynth- ‘rich in aspen trees' as underlying the names of a tribe, their land, a river and a town in it to the north of the Thracian Chersonesos; Thrac. epiclesis of Aphrodite Zēr-ynthía: ‘rich in wild animals', a kind of pótnia thērôn) and by the author himself (Gk Simó-eis, -entos, a river in Troad < Thrac. *zimo-wenϑ- = OInd. himá-vant- ‘snowy' of mountains, here of a mountain stream, cf. Gk. *kheimá-rhous ‘winter-flowing'). To these instances the epiclesis of Hera Rhēsk-ynthís is added, presumably deriving from the stem rēsk- (also raisk-, resk-) of unknown meaning but well-attested in Thracian anthroponymy. As for the Slavic evidence, the adjective *bogovętъ ‘blessed' (in the phrase ‘every blessed day', only Serbo-Croatian and Slovak) is taken into consideration as a possible counterpart to OInd. bhagavant-, but the interpretation by Marta Bjeletić as a compound of *bogъ ‘God' and *ęti ‘take' seems more plausible. The remaining discussion focuses on the intriguing possibility that the Common Slavic comparative *vęt-jь,vęt-ьši suppletive to *velьjь ‘big, large, great' is somewhat connected with *-ṷent-, either as arisen from the adjectives in *-ṷent- by the way of decomposition or inversely, as reflecting a root noun which was to become, by the way of composition, an adjective suffix known from other IE languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reexamines the connection between the Slavic ornithonyms for ‘nightingale' (Luscinia sp., esp. L. megarhynchos)', *solṷьcь, *solṷьcь, and so on, and Hittite šaluwai-, šaluwaja-, šalwini-, which Blažek (1998) already briefly drew attention t [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]