Zum idg. Adjektivsuffix *-ṷent-im thrakischen und slavischen

Abstract

The paper deals with possible traces of the Indo-European adjective suffix *-ṷent-/ *-ṷn̥ t-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 lt 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.