Charlemagne and All the King’s Men. PS korlĭ ‘king’?

The article is motivated by the historian F. Curta’s rejection of the traditional etymology of PS *korľĭ and the unsatisfactory treatment of this etymology in the authoritative Ètimologoičeskij slovar’ slavjanskich jazykov ed. by O. N. Trubačov. It shows that phonological and morphological analysis lead to a Proto-Slavic possessive adjective *korl-j-ĭ with an original referential value ‘Karl’s (representative)’, substantivized as ‘Frankish person of authority’, eventually > ‘regent, king’ (as first suggested by Lunt 1966). The Proto-Slavic status of *korľĭ, which some have doubted, is shown to be not an empirical but an important theoretical issue.