Dėl pavardžių „Žiulys“ ir „Žulys“ santykio

Pastabos The Utena residents’ village is not Narkūnai, but Norkūnai The village, situated 3 km southwest of Utena, by the Utenaitė stream, is listed as Narkūnai5 in the administrative-territorial division directory. This village (and its name) is fairly well known, mainly because of two famous hillforts, one called the Great Hillfort, or Utenis’s Castle, and the other the Small Hillfort, or Utenis’s Grave6. Local people pronounce the village’s name as na.rkúnai—with a half-long a in the first syllable7; therefore, the spelling Narkūnai must be considered incorrect in Standard Lithuanian, and the dialectal pronunciation must be transposed into Norkūnai. (If the first syllable had a short [a], we would hear it as a somewhat reduced [ʌ], whereas what we hear now is a clear [a], which misleads many people—it seems that one can write “as it sounds,” so even linguists whose native dialect is another one may make a mistake. It is important to understand that the half-long vowels of the Utena dialect cannot be represented directly in standard orthography, without transposition, because the Utena dialect has vowels of three different lengths, while Standard Lithuanian has only two.) Vladas Žulys Tako g. 1–7, LT–53356 Akademija Kauno r., Lietuva On the relationship between the surnames Žiulys and Žulys In the Dictionary of Lithuanian Surnames, the surname Žiulys is not explained; it is simply cross-referenced to the surname Žulys8. Apparently, it was assumed that Žiulys was a secondary, later surname, while Žulys was the original one (the relationship would be similar to that, for example, between the loanwords žūponas and žiūponas). The facts about the Utena dialect known to me compel a different explanation of this relationship. Most Utena residents named Žiulių and Žiulių lived before the Second World War in a fairly com- Directory of the Administrative-Territorial Division of the Lithuanian SSR 1. Vilnius: Mintis, 1974, 320. Lithuanian Soviet Encyclopedia 8. Vilnius: Mokslas, 1981, 92 (entry Narkūnai Hillforts). Only my mother, Rožė Cibaitė-Žulienė, who came from the not very distant village of Vosgėliai, pronounced it that way. Lietuvių pavardžių žodynas L–Ž. Vilnius: Mokslas, 1989, 1340 (Žiulys), 1348 (Žulys). 159 Pastabos practically along the road from Utena to Kuktiškės. In Šabaldauskai, Kovynė, Pakėnai (2 families), Kymėnai (4 families), Dirvoniškis (my birthplace), Antakalnis, and Artmoniškis (not Artmaniškis, as is often written, because the vowel a in the unstressed syllable -ma- is half-long, and thus corresponds to standard Lithuanian long o)9. They all called themselves, and were called by the local people, only Žiulys, although many were recorded in documents as Žulys. Only outsiders, such as teachers, called them Žulys, following the spelling. More than one of those Žiulys (or Žulys) has heard that they are descended from a Frenchman, but perhaps only our family retained more knowledge about it. According to my father Antanas Žulys’s account, the lord of the Šnieriškės estate had brought that Frenchman from somewhere, and he worked as a coachman. He must have arrived in Šnieriškės before the French invasion, because by the time Napoleon’s army was marching east, his son Steponas was already a child of several years. The descendants of that Frenchman were initially called Žiulijonai, which means that his French surname was Julian (my father’s memory did not preserve his first name10). This shows that the Utena-region surname Žiulys has no connection by origin with Žulys, since it is a shortening of Žiulijonas. I think the Žiulys turned into Žulys for a simple reason: in the 19th century, parish registers were written in Polish and Russian, which have no soft syllable žiu-, so žu- was written instead. Thus, strictly speaking, the otherwise Lithuanian surname Žulys and the Utena-region Žiulys are homonyms of different origins. This case shows that a purely linguistic explanation of surname origins can sometimes be highly risky. Vladac Žulys Tako g. 1–7, LT–53356 Akademija Kauno r., Lietuva 9 In 1853 he also lived in Paraudė, Šlaitinės, and Pauosbys; cf. G. Šnurova, Utena Eldership: Bilakiemis. Pakėnai. Vaikutėnai. Utena, 2005, 27. 10 But my father’s memory preserved the entire subsequent family genealogy along the male line: his father (my grandfather) was also Antanas (born, I believe, in 1867); his father was Edvardas, and Edvardas was the son of the aforementioned Steponas. (Jokingly, I sometimes say that I am a sixth-generation naturalized Frenchman.) 160