Grey: Former settlement area of the Polabian Slavs. Green: Uninhabited forest areas. Darker shade just indicates higher elevation. The map already shows the Saxon (Sasové) invasion into the Veletic/Slavic territory of the Volci (Volcae), Chaci (Chatti) and Chruści (Cherusci).
Polabian is an extinctWest Slavic language that was spoken by the Polabian Slavs (German: Wenden) in present-day northeastern Germany around the Elbe (Łaba/Laba/Labe in Slavic) river, from which its name derives (po Labe - up the Elbe or [living] up to Elbe). It was spoken approximately until the rise to power of Prussia in the mid-18th century, when it was superseded by Low German.
By the 18th century, Lechitic Polabian was in some respects markedly different from other Slavic languages, most notably in having a strong German influence. It was close to Pomeranian and Kashubian, and is attested only in a handful of manuscripts, dictionaries and various writings from the 17th and 18th centuries.
History
About 2800 Polabian words are known; of prose writings, only a few prayers, one wedding song and a few folktales survive. Immediately before the language became extinct, several people started to collect phrases and compile wordlists, and were engaged with folklore of the Polabian Slavs, but only one of them appears to have been a native speaker of Polabian (himself leaving only 13 pages of linguistically relevant material from a 310-page manuscript).[1] The last native speaker of Polabian, a woman, died in 1756, and the last person who spoke limited Polabian died in 1825.
The most important monument of the language is the so-called Vocabularium Venedicum (1679–1719) by Christian Hennig.
The language left many traces to this day in toponymy; for example, Wustrow (way to the island or place on the island), Ljauchów (Lüchow), Łuków (Luckau), Sagard, Gartow, Krakow (resembling Kraków, Krakov…) etc. The Polabian language is also a likely origin of the name Berlin, from the Polabian stem berl-/birl- (swamp).
Grammar
Phonology
For Polabian the following segments are reconstructable:[2]
forgive us our trespasses (or "debts"; cf. German use of feminine singular Schuld, "debt"/"guilt")
as we forgive those who trespass against us (or "our debtors"; German Schuldiger[e]n, however, refers only to perpetrators of wrongdoing, with dative plural of "debtors" instead being Schuld[e]ner[e]n),
Kapović, Mate (2008), Uvod u indoeuropsku lingvistiku (in Serbo-Croatian), Zagreb: Matica hrvatska, ISBN 978-953-150-847-6
Rzetelska-Feleszko, Ewa (2002), "Polabisch"(PDF), Enzyklopädie des Europäischen Ostens (in German), Klagenfurt, archived from the original(PDF) on 2007-09-27
Polański, Kazimierz (1993), "Polabian", in Bernard Comrie and Greville G. Corbett (ed.), The Slavonic languages, London & New York: Routledge, ISBN 978-0-415-28078-5
Słownik etymologiczny języka Drzewian połabskich, Part 1: ed. Tadeusz Lehr-Spławiński & Kazimierz Polański, Wrocław, 1962, from Part 2 on: ed. K. Polański, Wrocław, 1971–
Kazimierz Polański & Janusz Sehnert: Polabian-English Dictionary. The Hague: Mouton 1967
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