The paper’s objective is to define a word-formative status of derivatives com-posed of the initial part reduced to the phoneme e-, such as e-obchod ‘e-commerce’ or e-platba ‘e-payment’ in Slovak and e-dziekanat ‘e-registrar’ or e-zakupy ‘e-shop-ping’ in Polish. Their structure – written with a hyphen and the reduction of the initial part to a single phoneme – makes it difficult to assign them with an unam-biguous status of derivatives such as composites or compounds. In the literature on the subject they are characterised as a class of composites, though they are referred to as compound words. Based on the analysis of their word-formative and semantic structures, confronted with compound derivatives written with or without a hyphen, this paper classifies them into a class of composites that are referred to as e-composites.
This article is a side-result of a current large-scale research work on the Axio-logical Lexicon of the Slavs and their Neighbors. As the “house” is one of the entries included in the Dictionary, the author draws attention to three words preserved in the Slavic languages that should be recognized as the ones that re-fer to the original human household. They include (a) the South Slavic names that derive from the Proto-Slavic word *kǫtja, related to the Proto-Slavic form *kǫtъ ‘the internal angle of the house’; (b) the Polish dialectal word that is rec-ognized as an alleged Old Prussian relic of the lexeme kuk(u)rzysko ‘the place where formerly an old house was located’, ‘the hearth in a forge’; (c) the Proto Slavic word *jьstъba ‘a heated living room’, ‘a dugout’, ‘a cottage’, ‘home’, originally derived from the folk Latin form *extŭfa/*extūfa ‘primitive steam baths’.
The etymology of these words is confirmed by archaeological research which indicate that that the earliest households used by the Slavs had the form of a rec-tangular dugout with a fire place in the corner. The linguistic image of the world clearly mirrors the reality of the former times: all the words that are analyzed in the article refer to a place where the primary role is played by fire, the donor of heat and food that brings together the residents of the first primitive households built in this area.
The article presents an outline of the historical development of the semantics and axiology of the Polish and Czech approximate words (= words of similar sound but different senses in two related languages), chudy and some of its synonyms: szczupły, smukły, cienki (‘lean’, ‘having little flesh’) and skromny, ubogi, biedny, nędzny (‘poor in relation to material goods’) in Polish with their Czech equivalents.
Lean, skinny is the dominant meaning of the present-day Polish lexeme chudy. In the Old Polish language of the 15th and the 16th century, the adjective chudy denoting ‘a thin person’ was noted to also have the meaning of ‘poor’. As the word is found in church songs and in Ł. Górnicki’s writings, it is possible that this meaning arose due to the Czech influence. The author of this article has not found any later occurrences of the word with the meaning ‘poor’; however, the biblical expression of chudy rok (‘lean year’) has maintained the meaning of ‘unfruitful’ in Polish.
The lexeme chudy, signifying ‘poor’, originated in the Czech language in the13th or the 14th century. The previous meaning of ‘thin’ was adopted by the word hubeny. The lexeme chudomacka ‘soup poor in fat’ based on the root chud- carries traces of the previous meaning. Reference to this sense (i.e. ‘having little flesh’, ‘lean’) can be found in the context of atmosféra chudá na kyslík ‘atmosphere with little oxygen’, ‘poor in oxygen’.
The article also discusses contemporary semantic changes, which nowadays have positive connotations, especially with respect to the female gender.
The paper refers to the ways of categorizing the five senses, i.e. sight, hearing, smell, taste, and the tactile sense, as they are represented in the Slavic languages.
The case of perception involves several participants and several ways of perception: 1) active perception, which is an action in itself (смотреть ‘to look’, слушать ‘to listen’, нюхать ‘to smell, to recognize smell’, пробовать на вкус ‘to taste, to experience the flavor of food or drink’, щупать ‘to touch’); 2) passive perception, which in itself is a condition (видеть ‘to see’, слышать ‘to hear’, ощущать запах ‘to smell, be able to smell things’, чувствовать вкус ‘to taste, be able to experience the flavor of food or drink’, осязать ‘to feel’); 3) a perceptive (eyes, ears, nose, skin, tongue); 4) a percept (appearance, sound, smell, taste, texture); 5) perceptive predicates (qualities, capabilities) (выглядеть ‘to seem’, звучать ‘to sound’, пахнуть ‘to smell, to have a particular smell’, иметь вкус ‘to taste, to have a particular flavor’, иметь фактуру ‘to feel, to have a particular texture’). Whilst in some cases of perception the language contains the vocabulary to describe most – if not all – components of the situation, in other cases it demonstrates the lack of certain words. The only sense that is characterized with a complete paradigm is the sense of hearing (to listen, to hear, listener, sound, to sound) with *čuti and its derivates being able to have a general meaning of perception in itself; on the contrary, the vocabulary related to the sense of taste turns out to be the poorest.
On the one hand, the vocabulary of physical perception is universally tied to the lexis of emotions (e.g. чувство любви ‘feeling of love’, чувство отчаяния ‘feeling of despair’, чувство долга ‘sense of duty’ etc); on the other hand, it is connected with the “mental” vocabulary (i.e. to see ‘to understand’, ‘to be conscious of’, ‘to think’ etc.). This fact can be interpreted as an attempt to express the “continuity” of the human inner world; the non-strict discretization of certain ways of perception and delimited sensual, emotional, and mental areas by means of the language.
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