Re: Afro-Asiatic substrate (re "folk" "polk" "pulkas")

On 2009-07-31 00:17, Anatoly Guzaev wrote:

> You are right about Vasmer:
> Proto-Slav. *svętъ related to Lith. šveñtas 'holy' etc.
> In most of the Slavic languages the vowel /e/ is not nasalized, although
> there are Slavic dialects where, even in these days, the both words
> (holy, world/light) are pronounced with a strong nasalization;
> cf. Cz. svatý 'holy' but světec 'saint'; svatojánek, světluška
> 'glowworm, lightning bug'; you see here that svat- and svet- have
> interchangeable/ ///meanings - 'holy' and 'shiny, glowing'.

Modern Czech does not preserve nasal vowels. Polish does, and it has
<s'wie,ty> 'holy' (with nasal /eN/) but <s'wiat> 'world' and <s'wiatl/o>
'light' (no nasal vowel in any variety of Polish). I know of _no_ Slavic
language in which 'world/light' has "a strong nasalisation". Czech has a
consistent distinction between e^ < *e^ and a < *eN. The word
<svatojanek> refers to St. John (glowworms appear about that time of the
year), not to light.

Piotr