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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).[2] The last native speaker of Polabian, a woman, died in 1756, and the last person who spoke limited Polabian died in 1825.[citation needed]
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 "Place on the island", Lüchow (Polabian: Ljauchüw), Sagard, Gartow, Krakow etc. It is also a likely origin of the name Berlin, from the Polabian stem berl-/birl- (swamp).
Phonology
For Polabian the following segments are reconstructable:[3]
Polabian had free and mobile stress, which means its placement could not be predicted based on the shape of the word, and it could shift to other syllables in inflection and derivation, much like in Russian. Four-syllable words with stress on the last syllable had secondary stress on the second one.
Stress was interconnected with vowel reduction. All vowels except /ə/ and /ɐ/ were full vowels and could only occur in stressed syllables, or in the syllable immediately preceding primary stress, unless it was itself preceded by a syllable with secondary stress. Thus for example a four syllable word stressed on the third syllable had full vowels in the second and third syllable; but if this same word had stress on the last syllable, it had full vowels in the second and fourth syllable.
Reduced vowels were very short, so much that the transcribers (who mostly spoke Low German) sometimes ommited them in places where they could be expected, which was probably not caused by the ellipsis of said vowels, but rather by their very short duration. The full vowels were noticeably long and were often marked as such in the texts.[4]
The Lord's Prayer
This section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. The specific problem is: The Lord’s Prayer should be in Low German, not High German, since it was the former language that was spoken around the Polabians and assimilated them. Please help improve this section if you can.(May 2022) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
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),
and lead us not into temptation
but deliver us from evil (or "the Evil One").
Amen.
Notes
^Lehr-Spławiński, Tadeusz (1922). "Szczątki języka dawnych słowiańskich mieszkańców wyspy Rugii". Slavia Occidentalis (in Polish). II: 114–136.
Polański, Kazimierz (1993), "Polabian", in Bernard Comrie and Greville G. Corbett (ed.), The Slavonic languages, London & New York: Routledge, ISBN978-0-415-28078-5
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
