Incidentally, dług means “debt” in Polish and corresponds to the Russian долг.
There is a supposed connection between that word and the word długi (Polish) and до́лгий (Russian).
As Saskia Pronk-Tiethoff says “[t]he semantic connection between the Proto Slavic ‘long’ and ‘debt’ is explained by describing ‘debt’ as something that a creditor is being kept waiting for [presumably for a long time].”
Or maybe you have to “work off” your debt for a long time…
Or maybe the Russian (and indeed East and South Slavic) form is derived from the word for “hole” from dół > dołek (diminutive) > dolg that is долг.
In other words you are in debt when you are “in the hole” and the word “long” does not come into it at all.
Whatever you may think of those explanations, what is noticeable about both of those words – debt and long – is that the East and South Slavic (and Upper Sorbian) languages have the vowel before the “l”:
- so that you have долг (dolg) and до́лгий (dolgij)
whereas in Polish, Czech, Slovak and Lower Sorbian, the vowel follows the “l” or “ł”:
- so that you have dług and długi
In other words, you have:
- о́лг (olg) in the East and ług in the West.
Brueckner thought that the West Slavic version is derivable from the East Slavic and that this was attested in an early 12th century document.
But how the nobility of Poland spoke and how its people spoke are, as we know from among others this, two different things.
Maybe he was right. Maybe not.
Note that the Lithuanian version iłgas does not have the “d” in the beginning.
Note too that this is the same word as the Greek dolichocephalic (long-headed) and, indeed, this is the same word as the English word “long”.
In fact, the Polish historian Jan Długosz is sometimes Latinized as Johannes Dlugossius but at other times as Johannes Longinus – a fact mentioned by Brueckner above.
Which raises another question.
There is a tribe of the Langiones. It is mentioned by
- Julius Honorius
- Aethicus (not Ister)
So what you say? After all, Aethicus may have adapted what Julius Honorius put together (plus Orosius) so really only Honorius mentions these Langiones, right?
But not so. Earlier, as we discussed previously, we also have Longiones. These are mentioned by:
- Zosimus
who says:
“Probus also brought other wars to a successful conclusion without much trouble. He fought a fierce battle first with the German tribe of the Longiones whom he defeated, taking prisoner their leader Semno and his son, but after receiving suppliants, in return for the confiscation of all their prisoners and booty, he freed those he had captured, including Semno and his son, on fixed terms.”
The Polish scholar Aleksander Bursche writes:
“The identification of the Longiones in Zosimos with the Lugii seems almost certain.”
Even such meek doubts as expressed by Bursche, are happily ignored by the manly Thomas Gerhardt and Udo Hartmann who declare with disarming certainty that:
“When it comes to the “Longiones” (or Logiones) we’re talking about the cultic community of the Lugii.”
They then go on to describe more Vandals = Lugii wishful nonsense straight out of that prince of bull fables – Wolfram (and others) without any citations, of course. (Certitude never needs be slown down by pesky proofs and footnotes).
(And earlier, in Gall, we have the Lingones and the Leuci (not to mention the Lexovii)).
So could the Lugii be the “tall/lank/long ones”? That would explain why the same people could be called by some Longiones and by others Lugii. Of course, you have to explain that falling off “d” but Lithuanian also dropped it.
More mysteries or is the solution really simple?
And, regarding the Tollensee battle, someone just forwarded from a published dissertation by Christian Sell a statement that – based on “f3 values”:
“The most similar modern populations [to the Tollensee combatants] are the Polish, Austrians and the Scottish.”
I have no idea what f3 values are but “Scottish”, really!?
Well, of course:
Hey now!
🙂
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