The oldest West Slavonic borrowings from Germanic

Abstract

The borrowings from Germanic to Slavonic are quite enigmatic in certain aspects. If we assume that most of the borrowings only took place after the Slavonic expansion, it is intriguing how these words penetrated into Common Slavonic. The paper focuses on the West Slavonic borrowings which are easier to explain. Some of them seem to be from the period of the first contacts of the Slavs with West Germanic (šatъ, gъd(ъ)vab(ьje), nebozězъ), while others can be dated somewhere to the period of Charlemagne (mosędzь, chviľa). There is also a large group of borrowings from the period of the 10th and 11th centuries. A thorough analysis of phonological, geographical, historical, and cultural aspects can hopefully elucidate more Germanic borrowings and explain how they spread into Slavonic.