Meillet and How the Veneti Discovered America – Part I

Antoine Meillet‘s three and a half page article in the Revue des études slaves titled “De quelques mots relatifs a la navigation.” (A few words relating to navigation) has over the years served to muddy the Slavic origin waters.

We thought we should start tackling it here.

So what does Meillet have to say about navigation and the Slavs?

Essentially, he argues that the Slavic vocabulary contains a limited number of navigational words, indicating the Slavs landlocked origins.

Argument 1

The Indo-European root for “rowing”, present “across” the IE spectrum disappeared in Slavic.  Why?  Meillet has the answer.  Because the Slavs only navigated rivers and lakes.  Therefore, they had no use of “rowing” or “oars”, etc.  Instead, the used simpler “furrowing” techniques of transportation on water evidenced by the use of the word grebo meaning “I dig” or “burrow”.  Of course, the digging notion is present also in other IE languages.  Take, for example, the German Grab or the same grave (English).  A similar concept exists for physically “grabbing” someone.  Conceptually similar Slavic words can be found in greben (comb) or greblio (rake) or, for that matter, grobla (causeway/levee/dike – presumably, a result of digging up enough dirt).

As proof how easily such an association might arise in someone’s mind, Meillet cites a passage from Arrian of Nicomedia‘s Indica regarding Gedrosians (being from the coast between the Strait of Hormuz and the Indus river) that the travelers observed:

“…a pilot sailed with them, a Gadrosian called Hydraces… Thence about midnight they sailed and came to a harbour Cophas, after a voyage of about four hundred stades; here dwelt fishermen, with small and feeble boats; and they did not row with their oars on a rowlock, as the Greeks do, but as you do in a river, propelling the water on this side or that like labourers digging in the soil.”

That “digging” or “burrowing in” water could have been a natural progression of the concept of digging to simple navigation is, of course, obvious and hardly needs the above example from an entirely different part of the world.

More importantly, it is strange that Meillet should have chosen the Bulgarian or Russian гребло as the only “paddling” word to focus.  The word doesn’t seem to have existed in West Slavic languages.  Instead he could have just as easily looked at wiosło, весло, вясло, veslo – meaning “oar” in all Slavic languages.

The wiosło, вясло, veslo (an “oar” or “paddle” being a tool derived from wieźć – to carry, transport – hence wiosłować “to row”) contains ios or ies or ias just as jazda – ride which matches nicely with many European (Old European!) river names (Visla or Vis-tula but also Tam-issa, Is-ter and so forth).  Such Visla river names – aside from the well known Vistula itself – appear in as wide a variety of locations as the Alps (as in Wiesle) and the Shetlands.

This suggests a concept of movement and a rather ancient origin.  It also has nothing to do with digging, nor any such secondary meaning.  The concept of an oar embedded in the veslo can be applied to either a river or sea or ocean going ship.  The only thing that Meillet has shown is that the oar family of words began to mean – outside of Slavic – something other than mere paddling.  

Moreover, both of these types of words may have been associated with IE water travel.  The fact is that the -ios, -ias, -ies words existed outside of Slavic with same or similar meanings.  We said “ship” above but could have just as easily said “vessel”.  Now this comes from the Latin vasculum from vas a “container,” “vase” or “vessel” but also meant “ship” (a container ship concept all in one!).  Now, presumably the container concept came first but even that concept captures the notion of a fluid being contained (just think of a flower vase).

Yet, Meillet does not even discuss this – not even in a footnote!  

It seems very selective to focus on a word which – by the way – is not attested in all Slavic languages (such as West Slavic) – and build your sandcastle on that.

So why the selectivity?  He wrote his doctorate on Slavic languages.  He was familiar with Baltic languages (“anyone wishing to hear how Indo-Europeans spoke should come and listen to a Lithuanian peasant”).  On the other hand, he seems to have concentrated on Eastern and Southern Slavic languages and may have lacked the skill set to address as broad a topic as he tried to do within the above article.  In days past one could pretend to be a Slavicist solely coasting on your knowledge of Russian.

In the end, all that Meillet has shown is that in Bulgarian and in portions of Russian the word for a small boat oat developed from a word for digging.  Given that Slavic languages have another word for oar that carries no “digging” connotations, so what?  It’s as if he were to ignore the words ship, vessel, etc. and used the word “dinghy” to claim the British were not sea going people after all.

Argument 2

There is no “navi” type word for ship/boat in either Slavic or Baltic “probably” because that term did not survive as these folks were not seagoing.

For starters, this may instead suggest that such a word did not exist in IE at all and is a borrowing or a development that happened to non-Balto-Slavic languages. (And does Meillet seriously argue that the Balts did not engage in navigation on the Baltic?  Or just that their ships were not as big as Meillet would have liked them to be?).

More relevantly, the word did exist in the sense of “going to nava” (as in Krok went to the land of the dead when he passed away).  This nava has been understood in architectural terms but a reference to “Viking” boat funeral would provide a similar explanation with a nautical angle.

Furthermore, why should it matter that non-Slavic languages developed a word for ship that contains nauh or navis?

Isn’t the better question whether Slavs had a name for the concept of a “ship” whatever that name may have been?

Here Meillet makes a sub argument.  He states that Slavs do not have own words for the concept of a ship or a larger boat which he thinks is consistent with their simple navigation arts.  Thus, for example, the Byzantines speak of the Slavic monoxylae (i.e., μονοξυλα  ωλοια, as in the Russian odnoderevka, from “one trunk”).

He notes that all the basic words for boats in Slavic languages indicate simple boats made from single hollowed tree trunks of such “monoxyla” type such as:

• чёлн [choln] or czółno (i.e., a canoe), or

• aludii, ladii, ladja or лодья (lodya) (i.e., a boat, also Lithuanian aldija)

He associates the first with the Lithuanian keltas meaning “ferry” that reminds him (!) of Lithuanian kelmas “tree trunk”.  The second, he notes, Liden derives from the Norwegian olle meaning “big trough”, i.e., made from a hollow tree trunk.

Yet all of this is raw and wild speculation.  You could just as easily claim that lodya comes from lod (лод) meaning “ice” and try to prove that early Slavs had ice floats for boats.  Or that the aludii comes from ludi meaning “people” – after all the transport of people was the point of ferry boats, etc.

In fact, Meillet completely ignores statek.  This word existed in Polish for quite a while.  Why does he ignore it?  Just because he can’t find it elsewhere in Slavic?  But maybe it was “forgotten” just as the Slavs “forgot” nauh type words… We may note that Meillet’s reasoning is so razor thin we could just as easily use another Polish word okręt (meaning “that which is turned” – a word for a “ship” that is dated very roughly to the 16th century) to claim that this proves that the Poles were the first to propellers.  Or if that’s too much of a stretch, we could claim that okręt has something to do with the kra – again, floating ice – thereby confirming the above ice hypothesis or, in the “advanced Slavs” version, firmly (or as firmly as one can in these unchartered waters) establishing the fact that Slavs were the first to pioneer ice breakers…

We should note another interesting point made by Meillet.  He claims that korab, another Slavic name for a boat is a borrowing.  Specifically, he notes that this is a borrowing from Greek (karabos) and perhaps one of the earliest of such borrowings from Greek to Slavic.

The reason for the “early” nature of this claim is that the Slavic clearly has a “b” pronunciation in there but the Greeks, by the 1st or 2nd century, began to pronounce their b’s as v’s so, if Slavs, who supposedly appear on the historical stage first in the 6th century, had borrowed this word from Greeks they should have borrowed it in the form korav (indeed, this is the source of the later caravel).  This has given a number of historians/etymologists problems.  Thus, Alexander Brueckner, for example, suggests that the name may have been borrowed earlier via an intermediary language.  He says perhaps the Slavs got this from the Thracians.  That is, in his view, it’s impossible for the Slavs to have been neighbors to the Greeks in the 1st or 2nd century but conceivable for them to have been located next to the Thracians.

The above argument ignores the possibility of Greek colonies on the Black Sea (see the story of the Geloni and Budini in Herodotus, for example, to imagine the possibilities) but let’s put that aside.

We aim to show here on just how little these arguments are based.  Each such theory allows its inventor to write his or her doctoral thesis no doubt but too often carries us merely sideways.

The Greek word is karabos.  But what does it mean?  Well, it means a “ship”, of course.  Yet the use of the word in Greek for a ship seems to postdate antiquity (it’s really a Byzantine concept it seems).  So where does the Greek word come from?

An article by Jukka Hyrkkanen and Erkki Salonen first observes that Greek etymological dictionaries are scanty on the origin but that, for the most part, they seem to point towards the “beetle” or “lobster” (hence, too, a scarab).

Then the authors note that such an explanation is “unconvincing” and suggest that the word is not even Greek.  And, indeed, some etymological dictionaries suggest the origin of the word may be Macedonian.  The authors go further and suggest similarities with Arabic!  Indeed, in Arabic there is a word qarib meaning “boat”.   But they do not stop there.  The Arabic word may have come from Aramaic and originally from?  They suggest another language of a Semitic (?) people skilled in navigation such as the Phoenicians.  But then they note that the word may also appear in Ugaritic (“to approach”) and Akkadian (with the meaning “to approach/to bring/to transport?”).  They can’t quite pin this down but note that their view is that it is very improbable that the word is Greek and think that it is, instead, a borrowing into Greek from some unspecified Middle Eastern – probably Semitic – language.

What about the Slavs?  It seems they are merely the excuse for the authors’ excursus designed to establish that the word is not Greek but a conclusion must be presented nevertheless.  So what do we find out?  The paper notes that it is possible that the Slavs borrowed this non Greek word from the Greeks (which, of course, we know from the above would indicate an early Slav-Greek contact) but also may have borrowed it from that mysterious naval Semitic (?) people hundreds of years before the Slavs first had contact with the sea.

Of course this too raises questions.  How? Did the naval travelers also travel on the rivers to reach these landlocked Slavs?

We will pause here and address Meillet’s other arguments subsequently.  For now, a reflection is in order.

Thoughts

If we must posit ocean travelers, must they be Semitic Phoenicians?  Why not the Veneti?  (In fact, is there a link between the two?).

Which brings us to another name for a “boat”.  We know that the Finns (and other “Uralic” speaking peoples such as the Veps, Estonians, etc) call the Slavs Venäjä.  This means, in effect, boat people.  Thus, “boat” in Finnish is vene (veneh in Veps).  

Does this mean that the name Veneti was passed to the Romans via Finns?  Perhaps the secret, hidden Finns or Scritifinni!?  Or… did the Germans get that name from the Finns but then this would suggest Finnic-Slavic contact before Germanic-Slavic contact.

Who knows.

The point is that the above kinds of arguments could be used to prove just about anything.

You want to know something interesting about boats?

Ok, so take чёлн [choln] or czółno – why does it sound so similar to a “canoe“?  We know that a “canoe” is a word derived from a certain language spoken in the Lesser Antilles islands.

In that same language we have another name for a small boat.  This is pirogue.  And yet we have also heard in the Old World of pirones.  Recently we mentioned such reference in our discussion of Aethicus Ister as in “… the Albanians, Maeoti, and Mazeti, people from the Ganges, and Turks all use these boats, and call them pirones in their barbarian tongue.”

What language is that?  What language brought us both canoe and pirogue?  Why, the Carib language, of course.  Does this have anything to do with the Arabic qarib, the Greek karabos or the Slavic korab?

To top it off we will note again that the Slavic word orkan is supposed to have come from the word hurricane which is supposed to have come from another Arawakan (Carib is an Arawakan language) language of the Taíno people – the Taíno an extinct and “poorly attested” language.

And yet, hundreds of years before Columbus, the great wind-swept Slavic temple on the island of Ruegen was inside the Slavic city of Arkona… (Ruegen itself has a Slavic etymology from ruga, that is, a “wrinkle” – compare the Italian and Latin name for the same).

And then we have these Slavic Veneti.

Holy Quetzalcoatl! (after all we already had the Algonquian language featured here; the continental Caribs referred to the Europeans as “spirits of the sea” – Palanakili.  Palana, apparently, means sea in their language).

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