Towards the Etymology of the Names of the Dnieper Rapids in Constantine Porphyrogenitus: Βράσμα Νεροῦ

The names of seven Dnieper rapids in Constantine’s Porphyrogenitus De administrando imperio (‘On the Governance of the Empire’) are given both in ‘Slavonic’ and in ‘Rhosic’, i.e. Old Scandinavian, and in addition Constantine explains the meanings of some of these names in Greek. The present paper focuses on the name for the sixth rapid, Βeρούτςη/Λεάντι, and the aim of the author is to show that ‘Rhosic’ Λεάντι corresponds well to Constantine’s Greek translation of this name as ‘the Boiling of the Water’. The etymology to be proposed in this article has its precursor in a suggestion by Bohdan Strumiński but refines on his hypothesis.