Every September 28th, thanks to a brutal fratricide over a thousand years ago, the Czech Republic gives itself a day off.
The victim of that crime was Wenceslaus, ruler of Bohemia from 921 to maybe 935 AD; the chief perpetrator was his own dear brother Boleslaus. A life of Christian dogoodery and an untimely death together earned Wenceslaus sainthood and lasting fame. It reached an all-new audience with the publication in 1853 of English hymnwriter John Mason Neale’s lyrics for the carol Good King Wenceslas, which, ironically, few Czechs know about.
The duke (posthumously upgraded to a king by Otto I, so the carol is technically correct) remains present in modern Czech life. For example, there’s the thoroughfare and building site of Wenceslas Square in central Prague, which is supervised by an equestrian statue of the square’s namesake. To the northeast of Prague, just down the road from where I live, lies the location of the medieval murder, the heart of a landscape of Wenceslaus-centred devotion – although, curiously, the town that has grown up around Bohemia’s oldest pilgrimage destination is called Stará Boleslav, after the naughty brother.
In the local Czech language, his name, proudly borne by many subsequent men, is Václav. If we compare this with the English rendition Wenceslaus and squint a little, we can appreciate how the letters of one roughly match with those of the other: V for W, C for C, L for L. The English one, variably spelled Wenceslaus and Wenceslas, ends with an additional Latinate S, but also maintains three syllables, which generations of Czech mouths have mashed into just two.
Another disagreement is the N. The foreign form has a nasal first syllable (Wen-), but not so with the domestic one (Vá-). What gives? Whence did English gain it, or whither did it depart from the Czech name? Could this difference serve to introduce the curious reader to a historical-linguistic topic covered in an article of about 2,000 words?
Well, funny you should say that.
Czech, as is well known, is a member of the Slavic language family, and centuries ago, in early-medieval times, Slavic speech underwent a reorganisation of its sounds.
Back before its disintegration into a disharmonious group, at the prehistoric ‘Proto-Slavic’ stage, speakers of Slavic (unconsciously) altered the blueprint for an acceptable syllable. No longer could the syllables of their words end in a consonant; they all now had to be ‘open’, ending in the obligatory vowel that functions as the heart of every syllable.
My go-to example for the difference between open and closed syllables is my own name; Danny would be an odd but phonotactically fine first name in Proto-Slavic, comprising as it does two open syllables (Da-nny, IPA: /dæ.ni/). My closed-syllable surname, Bate, wouldn’t pass.
Proto-Slavic’s ‘Law of Open Syllables’ wasn’t an especially strange shift for a spoken language. For two populous present-day languages that greatly prefer their syllables to be open, listen to Italian and Japanese. It meant that a lot of words already present in Slavic needed to be rejigged, in order to obey the new law. I’ve written previously about how the modern disagreement over one European river’s name is a product of this gradual rejigging: namely the waterway known as the Elbe to the Germans and the Labe to the Czechs.
One target for censure was the many syllables that ended in a nasal consonant – your Ms and Ns. An English word like bin, gum or phantom would be in violation of syllabic law, and there were many such words in Pre-Proto-Slavic. Granted, this was a prehistoric time, leaving us no texts and direct witnesses to the before-stage. But we can believe in the existence of these words on the basis of comparison with words in non-Slavic (and so unaffected) members of the wider Indo-European family, such as in Latin, Lithuanian and even English.
What Proto-Slavic did with syllabic sequences of a vowel and a nasal consonant (‘VN’ for short) was to combine the two into one sound: a nasal vowel. This is a vowel sound during the emission of which air leaves via the nose as well as the mouth. You can hear plenty of such sounds in French (e.g. dent, enfant, incroyable) and Portuguese (e.g. bom, pão, sim). These, as their spelling suggests, have also emerged from historical VN sequences.
So, in the earliest days of distinctively Slavic speech, words like ‘angurio-’ (meaning ‘eel’, related to Latin anguilla), ‘ronka’ (hand, arm’, related to Lithuanian ranka) and ‘gansis’ (‘goose’, related to the English word) had their first syllables opened up by including a nasal vowel. They became *ǫgorь, *rǫkà and *gǫ̑sь in Proto-Slavic. The little hook under the O there, known as an ogonek, is how we scholars today refer to this ancient nasal quality in Roman letters.
By the time the air had cleared, united Slavic speech had gained two nasal vowels: one pronounced with the tongue forwards (Ę), the other made with the tongue backwards (Ǫ). These sounds were obviously part of early Slavic, because, when it then starts to get written down, the two get their own dedicated letters.
The earliest texts (from the 9th century onwards) are in a southern dialect, which we call Old Church Slavonic, partly because it’s very old, partly because it was intended for church uses. This dialect soon acquired not one but two ways of being written down.
In the Glagolitic script devised first for Slavic, the two nasal vowels are Ⱔ and Ⱘ. In the Cyrillic system that quickly usurped the Glagolitic, they are the adorable Ѧ and Ѫ. The first of those two, by the way, is the origin of the stereotypically ‘Russian’ letter Я. It’s got nothing to do with R.
The aforementioned word for ‘hand’, *rǫkà, surfaces as in рѫка in Old Church Slavonic texts like the following:
аште ли рѫка твоѣ ли нога твоѣ съблажнѣетъ тѧ отъсѣци и
‘If either your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut them off’
ašte li rǫka tvoě li noga tvoě sъblažněetъ tę otъsěci i
(Codex Marianus, Matt. 18.8)
The two nasal vowels are the Indo-Europeanist’s and etymologist’s friends, because being aware of them and of what they used to be allows us to make connections beyond Slavic.
For instance, the Old Church Slavonic word for the number five is пѧть (pętь), and if we rewind its nasal vowel back to a sequence of vowel and nasal consonant, we can better grasp its link to equivalent numbers like Greek πέντε (pénte). The same applies to пѫть (pǫtь) ‘path’, part of a word family with Latin pōns ‘bridge’.
The nasal vowels might appear at the end of a word too, especially when expressing certain grammatical information. The typical Indo-European -m ending for the accusative case found itself transformed into a mere nasal quality of a final vowel in early Slavic. The accusative of рѫка, such as for a hand undergoing extension, is рѫкѫ (rǫkǫ).
и простеръ рѫкѫ исъ коснѫ и
‘And reaching out a hand, Jesus touched him’
i prosterъ rǫkǫ Isъ kosnǫ i
(Codex Marianus, Matt. 8.3)
Relatedly, the Old Church Slavonic pronouns for accusative ‘me’ and ‘you’ are мѧ (mę) and тѧ (tę).
So far, so nasal. However, these two distinct vowels weren’t to last in either speech or spelling.
As the Slavic dialects became Slavic languages of decreasing mutual intelligibility, the nasal vowels became plain oral ones. This wasn’t an instantaneous or uniform downgrading. In the east at least, in what became Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian, it was probably a done deal by the 10th century. What vowel the two turned into also differed across the large Slavic linguistic zone. Here are the shifts in a nutshell, pinched from a textbook, with abbreviations for the various Slavic languages.
To take the language closest to my home and heart: in the west, in the emerging Czech language, nasal Ǫ became oral U. While Old Church Slavonic has рѫкѫ (rǫkǫ), Czech has ruku. Likewise, it has the words úhoř ‘eel’ and husa ‘goose’. Meanwhile, the front nasal vowel has ended up as either Ě or Á, a difference dependent on the duration of the vowel.
The big counterpoint to all of this, the keener linguists cry, is Polish. Besides some documented appearances in dialectal Bulgarian, Macedonian and Slovenian, Polish to this day has continued to include nasal vowels among its sounds. However, Polish has not maintained them straightforwardly and perfectly since the days of Proto-Slavic.
For one reason, Polish actually merged Ę and Ǫ during the Middle Ages into a single nasal vowel, which could be long or short. This single nasal vowel of different quantities then divided itself into two new nasal vowels of different qualities, written Ą and Ę. These are not pronounced the same as the original Proto-Slavic pair.
For another reason, Polish Ą and Ę aren’t realised as nasal vowels in every instance. Often, for phonetic ease, Polish speakers simply say a boring oral vowel or a sequence of vowel and nasal consonant. A nasally written word like będę, meaning ‘I will be’, tends to sound like ‘bendeh’. The same goes for the Ę at the end of the magic word proszę ‘please’, which tends to have no audible nasal quality.
Nonetheless, the two nasal vowels of Polish remain a common and salient feature of the language, distinguishing it from its Slavic neighbours. An element of identity and propriety may motivate their continued inclusion in Polish pronunciation; to pronounce the Ą and Ę is seen as ‘good’ and fancy Polish. To do so, perhaps sometimes on etymologically incorrect grounds, might earn you the description of being “ą-ę” – that is, a bit posh or snobbish.
So, we have two historical vowels, present in the common origin of the Slavic languages, but increasingly absent across its daughters today. What has all of this got to do with Duke Wenceslaus?
That mighty preamble gives us all the phonological ingredients we need to understand the Wenceslaus–Václav disagreement and the disappearing N. In brief, Václav used to be pronounced with a nasal vowel, namely Ę. In the days of the saint, he would’ve introduced himself as something like *Vęťeslavъ. In this name, as in the rest of Czech, the nasal Ę has ended up as non-nasal Á. Hence, we get Václav.
However, the nasal vowel hung around long enough to have passed from early Czech speech into surrounding languages: medieval German, for one, and also the international Latin. What speakers of those languages heard, they wrote down with the letters E and N.
It’s a common occurrence that loanwords in foreign languages can preserve aspects of the words lost in the donor language. Not being subject to the same changes in sounds or meaning, loanwords are a great source of information about what their language of origin used to be like. In this case, Wenceslaus is a witness to the nasal vowel lost from Václav.
There are other examples of Slavic words that escaped before de-nasalisation came into force. Another name is that of Svatopluk the Great, ruler of Great Moravia in the 9th century, whose correspondence with foreign powers, primarily the pope, has partly survived. As the Slavs make their entry into Christendom and writing, the spelling of Slavic is uncertain and unsettled; Svatopluk appears in letters as Zuentopolcus, Zuentibaldus, Sfentopulchus, Sphentopulchus, Sventopolcus, Zvuentapu and even Pentepulcus, but present in each variant are E and N. They bear witness to the nasal vowel that the first element of his name (meaning ‘holy’) once contained, now absent from Czech svatý and Slovak svätý.
Not just royal names but everyday words too preserve the whispers. To the south of Slovakia is Hungary, where the sixth day of the week is szombat. Ultimately related to the word sabbath, this looks to be an early adoption into Hungarian from a Slavic word with a nasal vowel: attested in Old Church Slavonic сѫбота (sǫbota), but no longer to be found in Slavic words for ‘Saturday’.
More relevant to English, the word vampire likewise likely incorporates a relic of a Slavic nasal vowel. Its etymology, other than a general Balkan origin, is deeply complex and suitably mysterious. The term in the west of Europe may go back, via Hungarian, to a South Slavic language of the Balkans, who had previously got it from the Greeks, who had themselves heard and modified an originally Slavic word. The disputed word at the heart of this byzantine maze might’ve meant something like ‘unburnt’ or ‘impure’. Whatever it was, it contained a nasal vowel by the first Slavic stage of its journey, one still entombed in the first syllable of vampire.
The relevant etymologies can go in the opposite direction, into Slavic. If a foreign word with the right sounds was adopted by Slavs early enough to be eligible for a nasal vowel, it might then undergo the same de-nasalising shifts.
A favourite example is dankōn in Old High German, equivalent and related to English thank. Medieval Slavs learned the word (if not also the sentiment behind it) from German speakers at a point when the AN could be approximated with their Ę. From this point, the Ę travelled down the various paths of dialectal development, becoming děkovat in Czech, дя́кувати (djákuvaty) in Ukrainian, and the reliably nasal dziękować in Polish, all verbs meaning ‘to thank’.
Finally, to return to the oft-carolled duke, Wenceslaus can help us with chronology. Being a specific historical figure with fairly secure dates in history, he helps us historical linguists to date when the western Slavic dialect (that is, Czech-to-be) lost its nasal vowels by turning them into non-nasal ones. Given the N in Wenceslaus, it can’t have yet been accomplished during his lifetime in the early 10th century, and maybe for a little while afterwards, as his name and fame spread abroad.
This is some time before our earliest texts in Czech, so it’s an onomastic stroke of luck that we can be ‘precise’ about the loss of nasal vowels in Czech, and pinpoint this prehistoric change to the late 10th–late 12th century. By the standards of historical linguistics, that’s pretty good.
Like how Charlemagne assists with dating the source of the Elbe/Labe disagreement, the legacy of saintly Wenceslaus includes a linguistic element. Within a name annually sung by foreign tongues, the sounds of yesteryear are buried deep (and crisp, and even).
END.
Primary Sources
- Old Church Slavonic verses from syntacticus.org
Non-linked references
- Huntley, D. (1993). Old Church Slavonic. In The Slavonic Languages. 125–187. Routledge.
- Kortlandt, F. (1994). From Proto-Indo-European to Slavic. Journal of Indo-European Studies, 22(1–2). 91–112.
- Kosek, P., & Ziková, M. (2021). Czech Vowel Fronting (Česká Přehláska). In Encyclopedia of Slavic Languages and Linguistics Online. Brill.
- Lunt, H. G. (2001). Old Church Slavonic Grammar. Mouton de Gruyter.
- Sussex, R., & Cubberley, P. (2006). The Slavic Languages. Cambridge University Press.
- Szeptyński, R. (2024). Nasal Vowels. Encyclopedia of Slavic Languages and Linguistics Online. Brill.
Images my own, from Wikimedia Commons or from credited sources. Only human intelligence (or lack thereof) was used in the creation of this article.
If you, somehow, fancy more writing from me, but on English etymology, here’s a recent piece by me for Psyche/Aeon, in which I try to impart the mind and soul of an etymologist to newcomers: How to be a Word Detective.
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