Hi Craig,
your German is really not bad. Greetings to Texas, the country of the dreams
of my youth. I always wished to be a cowboy in Texas or Arizona.
Yes, we have spoken about slavic names, but the discussion was about Polish
people and names at the former silesian border line to Poland. In this area
we had a lot of people carrying slavic names with German passports. They
were "Germanized", they perfectly spoke German but they had slavic names.
The discussion was about the name "Janus" (not the roman God). There was
found in a book that "Janus" might be a form of the hungary name "Janos".
Markus wrote that the people in Silesia with slavic names tried to found a
different explaination to the slavic version where the name could come from.
The reason was, they want to be Germans and they shamed to have slavic
names. This is really true and there are a lot of examples how slavic names
were "germanized": Laskowski = Laske, Zygusz changed to Sigusch or Sigert
etc. But in the case "Janus" we are not sure: Is the base the Polish
"Janusz" or the Hungarian "Janos".
I don't have important information to the Sorben. I think you know that they
are living in Sachsen, which is a part of the Federal Republic of Germany
and not Poland.
Best regards
Bernd Goertz