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Originally Posted by
A. Papadimitriou
I am not assuming it. I know it and it is a well known fact. It is evident from the Sclavenic names. For example Οστροβουνιπραχ /οstrovuniprax/, 'v' written with 'β'.
'b' written with 'μπ' is not at all a modern convention.
I disagree. As I said, the letter Beta (Ββ) was indeed pronounced as /v/ in the Middle Ages, but in spelling convention, people would just substitute /b/ as "v" (β). The convention to spell /b/ as 'mp' (μπ) is a modern convention. One example that comes to my mind, even if it is from (very) early Byzantine Greek, would be Procopius (in his Gothic War, book 1, chapter 15), who spells Ravenna as Rabenna (Ραβεννα) and Benavente as Benebenton (Βενεβεντον). For the latter, it would be intuitive (from the perspective of modern Greek) to render both Betas as "v", but in the name Benavente, the first Beta clearly represents a /b/, and the second represents a /v/. If you find one example where a /b/ in a foreign name is rendered /mp/ in medieval Greek (closer in time to the Volga route), please show us.
Γελανδρι /jelanðri/ is a 'Sclavenic' term in the text and means ήχος φραγμού, not a term used by Rus, so even if you want to propose a Germanic etymology (I recognize that it's easy to do it) it has nothing to do with the Rus.
It would have been a Germanic term used by Slavs and nothing more than that.
And here I thought we were talking about Varangians (i.e. Norse). Also, stop applying the phonology of modern Greek (Gamma as /j/) retroactively to medieval Greek. It doesn't work that way.