I stumbled upon get this article and found it fascinating - especially considering my ancestors are Lower Wendish.
But basically it rewrites history. Can some of you esteemed historians and linguists please have a look over it and the examples given and help me decide if it is plausible?
I loved it so much I use one of its terms as my Username. Trovidas. I think those passages alone are inspiring - but maybe that's just because I'm a pagan 😉
Are you referring to this? If so, it's 100% garbage.
First, endonyms with slov or slav are absolutely unrelated to sol but perhaps come from a family of Indo-European roots related to English listen. It has no relation to Swede, and the forms with /w/ are innovations.
Second, we know next to nothing about the Slavic pantheon, and proposing connections to Semitic and Japanese is absolutely unsupported.
Third, the link between Veneti and the Wends seems reasonable, but the relationship to a root meaning 'know' is incredibly unlikely. You can't just have this n showing up or not in the middle of a root like that. The idea that Buddha is of "Wendish origin" is absolute nonsense. The word itself is almost certainly attested in Sanskrit well before we have any historical records of the Slavs, and is a perfectly good Sanskrit formation. It is related to the Slavic form budit', but in no way descended from it, and we can tell that by the preservation of the h, which Balto-Slavic lost.
Fourth, I'm 98% certain you can't have Celtic initial d corresponding to Balto-Slavic initial t, so the link between druid and trovid (or whatever it is) is bunk.
Fifth, again, no. Just no. Slovene retains the dual, sure. That doesn't mean it's ancestral to Latin and Sanskrit. It's just not. And claims of influence in East Asia and the Americas are, again, unadulterated garbage.
Sixth, not to sound like a broken record, but NO. We can't meaningfully talk about Wendish (which, for the record, traditionally refers to a West Slavic language or set of languages in Poland but by which the author seems to mean Slovene) until the late Middle Ages. The idea that it was the lingua franca of the Roman Empire is just laughable.
I don't have the time or energy to go through the rest of the bullet points, but I can assure you that almost every sentence on this webpage is factually incorrect.
You tried making both a link post and a text post. You can only do one. You'll need to edit your post to include the link or add the link in a comment.
That being said, even without seeing the link, I have to say that this is unfortunately quackery. Upper and Lower Sorbian (or Wendish, if you prefer the historical term) are West Slavic languages, closely related to Polish, Czech and Slovak, and more distantly related to the rest of the Slavic subgroup of Indo-European (so Russian, Bosnian-Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, etc.). They are clearly a subgroup within Indo-European, rather than some sort of ancestral form.
For example, we have good evidence that Slavic languages lost a a number of distinctions maintained in some other groups. For example, Proto-Indo-European distinguished between a series of voiceless, voiced, and voiced aspirated consonants.
Voiceless consonants are produced without the vocal folds vibrating, whereas voiced consonants are produced with vibration. In English, the initial t in time is voiceless, while the initial d in dime is voiced. You can check this yourself by lightly pinching your Adam's apple and feeling when the vibration starts and stops while you produce these words.
Aspirated consonants are produced with a strong burst of air in addition to the consonant. In English, the initial p in pea is aspirated, while the p in speed is not. You can check this yourself by holding a piece of paper in front of your mouth while you produce these words. The paper will move a bit further with pea than with speed.
As I mentioned, many Indo-European languages maintain a distinction between voiceless, voiced, and voiced aspirated consonants in some form or another. For instance, Proto-Indo-European (abberviated PIE) distinguished *t (voiceless) from *d (voiced) from *dh (voiced aspirated). In English, for instance, we find this three-way distinction preserved (albeit in a modified form). For example:
But we only find a two-way contrast in Slavic languages. Take Russian:
Notice how we have th-, t-, and d- in English, while we only have t-, d-, and d- in Russian. You'll find the same pattern in Sorbian and in all other Slavic languages. It would be pretty odd for a distinction to arise out of nothing, so the more logical line of thinking would have to be that the Slavic languages lost a distinction their ancestors made. So it would end up making little sense for Sorbian (or really--to be clear--any modern Indo-European language) to be the "mother" of all other Indo-European languages.
Sorbian is a minority language. You often see this kind of claim repeated with many other minority languages. Make no mistake, I am all for the advancement of indigenous and minority languages, but we can do so without the crackpot theories that don't bother with the 200+ years of study we have into Indo-European (or any other language family).
Hi OP, can you give us a link? Thanks!
Sorry, everyone I've been at work and I'm a newbie - this reddit way of posting is something to get used too...
http://www.globalwends.com/uploads/1/3/0/4/13044918/wendish_in_roman_tres_galliae.pdf
For what it's worth, when I stumbled across this late last night and I was reading it I was thinking 'there is no way....' But the Wend in me thought 'how cool would this be if it was!' So no, I don't believe it - but while we are all here; could someone (especially if you know lower Wendish) confirm if Trovidas is a word and its history and etymology? I am quite taken with the word, it has a ring to it.