Acta Linguistica Lithuanica

LIV (2006), 101 – 121

Remarks

Remarks

On the correct form and possible origin of the Utena-area village Kimėnai

The village Kimenai, whose name occurs in various written sources, is in the Utena eldership, 6 km from Utena, on the right-hand side of the road to Kuktiškės. This form was also used by Kazimieras Būga in the introduction to the Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language (1924) (see his Selected Writings 3, 136), but, as far as I know, he himself never visited anywhere south of Utena and apparently took this name from some unreliable written source. The somewhat later book Populated Places of Lithuania, which presents data from the 1923 census of Lithuania’s population (Kaunas, 1925), also lists the village of Kimėnai (p. 451), but the names in that census do not appear to have been checked by linguists. We also find the form Kimėnai in the Directory of the Administrative-Territorial Division of the Lithuanian SSR (Vilnius: Mintis, 1974, 1, 320), which supposedly paid much attention to the accuracy of settlement names. Thus, Kimėnai has now become the official name. But one thing is an official spelling, and another is one that has been properly verified, since language historians are primarily concerned with the latter. It is likely that either no true dialectologists visited this area, or that Kazimieras Būga’s authority prevailed when the spelling was decided.

Local people pronounce the name of this village only as ki.mė'nai¹, and the half-long unstressed-syllable i of the Utena dialect cannot in standard language be represented by a short i (for example, speakers of the Utena dialect distinguish vowel length perfectly well in the words kiminai and ki.mė'nai). Only people without the necessary linguistic training make such spelling errors, because they do not understand that, when writing in standard language, the half-long vowel of the Utena dialect must be transposed. Thus, the name is in fact Kymėnai, which outsiders sometimes also call Kiemėnai by way of folk etymology.

The origin of the root kym- is not entirely clear. Two possibilities can be considered. The first is this: the two-stem personal name Kymantas also had the shortened form *Kymas, from which Kymėnai arose. But Būga compared the name of this village with the name of the Sūduva region

¹ Among the local people I count my grandfather Antanas Žulys and my father Antanas Žulys, who were born in this village. I think I belong here too, having come from Dirvoniškis, whose land adjoined that of this village (Dirvoniškis was destroyed during the 1948 deportation).

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Pastabos

Kymenow (Selected Writings 3, 136); thus Kymėnai could also be a Lithuanianized form of the name of a village of Yotvingians who moved there because of the threat of war.

Vladas Žulys

Tako g. 1–7

LT-53356 Akademija, Kauno raj., Lietuva

Completed 2006 10 09

Mažmožis 9

During the 1926 land reform, its special Board did not wish to allow the officially used names imposed by estate owners in Slavicized form. One such Lithuanized village was in Žalioji rural district, Vilkaviškis County, near the village of Augalai, Sūdava (even in the place-name index cards (files), it was not marked with an accent). It took root; only later was the form Sūduvà accepted and accented as a third-paradigm place name by analogy (cf. Igluvà, Lietuvà, Šaukuvà, etc.).

Simas Karaliūnas is probably unfamiliar with this history; he has not examined files containing place names and the Land Reform Board’s notes, so Sūdava, which he cites in the book The Baltic Past in Historical Sources, vol. II, Vilnius: Institute of the Lithuanian Language, 2005, p. 267, as a fact of great antiquity and significance, is actually a coinage by land surveyors in 1926. Through a certain analogy, it came to be written as Sūdava; in standard language, following the usage of many place names with the suffix -uvà, it is Sūdūvà ^(3a); it seems that this form was not used in everyday speech and was recorded by no one, although it is correctly formed, but lacks historical sources.

Mažmožis 10

In Žemaitija, in the Venta River basin, there was a large marsh, Debėšnos (plural; pronounced d'eb'ė.s-nas, d'eb'ė.snu, può d'eb'esnàs, Pavandenė, Užventis); even Žemaitė wrote it this way in her work. This form was successfully promoted in Aldonas Pupkis’s book Vietovardžių žodynas, 2003, p. 79. Unexpectedly, Simas Karaliūnas takes up and disseminates the implausible, ahistorical form Debesna; see Baltų praeitis istoriniuose šaltiniuose I 67, III 27, 59 (from Old Russian, following Spruogis and O. Trubachyov; Дебесна in the same work, vol. II, p. 302).

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