today's name of the day
They have the wrong definition for Wenceslas. I looked up more in as many slavic languages as I could to see if any has 'ventie' as the word for more. None that I could find did. Some of the Southern and Western had 'vesh' in the begining of their word, no n's in them, Albanian has something more like 'mash' or 'mesh' for more, and Eastern Slavics have 'bolshe' as their word, which is based on their word for big. My Czech professor in college told us that Wenceslas was the Latinized form of Vaclav.
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Also, Albanian is not a Slavic language.It's in it's own language branch.
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I happen to be part Albanian. Albanian sounds very interesting.
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I thought I heard somewhere that it was its own branch of Slavic. Since it's so close to the South Slavic languages geographicaly, it would make sense.
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It's in it's own branch just as Slavic is it's own. Whereas Slavic branches off into many more languages the Albanian group does not. And it wouldn't make sense to me based on geography because it often doesn't mean much. Romanian, for example, is a Romance language. Hungarian is not even an Indo-European language while many languages spoken in India are. The only languages in Europe in the same group(Finno-Ugric)as Hungarian are Finnish and Estonian.
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I never mentioned Magyar (Hungarian). It's an intrusive language closer to Central Asian languages. Or Romanian. Macedonian and Greek are used in Eastern Europe too, but I guess you assumed I knew they're Hellinistic. Or Lihtuanian and Latvian, wherever they fall. With the knowledge of Slavics that I have, and what I looked up, it didn't look right to me.
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Except that Macedonian is actually Slavic
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Agreed, good catch!Agreed
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Falemnderit. I already knew about Romanian being a Romance language and Hungarian not being a Slavic. I may have been confused on a few things, but I'm not a complete idiot.
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Actually I was just using those as examples of languages that are not Slavic in a geographic area where most languages are Slavic. I never said you didn't know this but you're not the only one that reads this so I wanted to make clear examples for anyone else that read the entry.
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Well if India did not have Indo-European languages, then how would the language family have gotten its name :-)Okay, okay, I know, we discuss facts about people's first names, not language family names ...
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He did say"Hungarian is not even an Indo-European language while many languages spoken in India are.":)

This message was edited 8/22/2008, 8:56 PM

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No, it's correct. In Polish for example the word for more is więcej. The oldest Polish form of the name is Więcesław. A book of names I have from Poland gives the same definition. Vaclav is related as well, they are both forms of the same name. This name book lists these variants in Polish:Wacław
Wenczesław
Wieńczysław
Wińczesław
Węcesław
Węcław
Więcław
WęsławAnd Polish is my first language so I think I know what I'm talking about.:)
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My Polish is very limited. All I know is 'Jak se mash' 'Dobzhe'. My seventh grade homeroom teacher entered the a few days and greeted us that way. I also didn't see the connection from my two semesters of Czech or any of my Russian classes. I have a BA in that and Spanish.
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You have a degree in Czech and you don't know that the word for more in Czech is větší?(one of the words for more). I would think the meaning of this name is very clear to those with any knowledge of Slavic languages.
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I have a BA in Russian, not Czech. I guess I didn't make that clear enough. Unfortunately, my summer in Moscow didn't help with Russian fluency because everyone wanted to use English with the American, and I could only find a job working with Mexican immigrants and their kids, meaning that my Russian is now rusty.
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But the fluency or not in Russianhas nothing to do with the general linguistic knowledge, especially related with Slavic languages (to know that Albanian is not a Slavic language but has its own branche/group in the Indo-European tree of languages), nor with the philological knowledge about common Slavic lexic and roots, nor (more important) with the knowledge about linguistic ressources to research roots and etymologies (the usual modern dictionaries can be useful, but are not professional tools
in etymological researches).
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And one needs to realize that...Practically speaking, while you can safely carry over common knowledge from Russian to another East Slavic language, like Ukrainian, it is not so straightforward with languages from other branches of the Slavic group, like Polish (which is West Slavic).
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Well,after her comments about the information being wrong, Albanian as Slavic language, Macedonian as non Slavic language, the spelling of "Hellinistic" instead of "Hellenistic" and the sentence "Or Lithuanian and Latvian, wherever they fall.", I'm very concerned for the level of some colleges in linguistic fields (she said that she has a BA in Russian and another one in Spanish).
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