摘要：COMMENTS ON THE EVOLUTION OF LITHUANIAN COMPOUND PROPER NAMES WITH vaiš - AS THE FIRST COMPONENT Summary This article investigates changes that took place while writing down the first component vaiš - of compound proper names in various types of documents by people with a varying knowledge of Lithuanian. The following variants of vaiš - are attested, due to phonetic context and incorrect adaptation in a foreign writing system: vais -, vaiz -, vaiž -, vois -, voiš -, voiz -, voiž -, veiš - and veis -. Stems of this type were further abbreviated, giving rise to the component vai - ( voi -). This process took place in all Lithuanian-speaking areas, but was especially frequent in the Žemaitian region. It is particularly common among compound proper names with the second component ° nor -, rarer with ° but -, ° vyd -, ° vil -. The stem vai - is thus a variant of vaiš - and is not related to Lith. vajóti , vajỹs , as it is often maintained in onomastic literature. Compound proper names with vos - as their first component are probably also should be linked to compound words with vaiš - as their first component. In the process of writing proper names that contain vaiš - in non-Lithuanian documents, [ai] was monophthongized and written instead with or . The process of monophthongization was stimulated by the dialect of the Žemaitian region as well.
