From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 352
Date: 1999-11-27
----- Original Message -----From: Mark OdegardSent: Saturday, November 27, 1999 8:42 PMSubject: [cybalist] Re: Semantic fieldsAlexander Stolbov writes:To my mind one of examples of the non-trivial semantic connections are English lie (= German liegen) and lie (= German luegen). I don't think these are just homonyms as we also have in Russian lezhat' (to lie on smth.) and lozh (a lie). I wonder does this pair exist in all IE groups? If not, we can consider it as a common innovation or a borrowing (both facts are interesting). If yes, we get the information on PIE national psychology. Anyway these things are worth investigating, are not they?
I don't see any particular etymological connection. The semantic and phonological falling-together of English lie and lay is a paradigm for this phenomenon. I believe the verb 'lie' ('to recline'), in actual spoken English, is defective, surviving only in the present tense and present participle; the preterit of 'lie' (lay) is merged with lay as 'laid', with the past participle 'lain' being wholly archaic. English lie and lay, then, have effectively nearly fallen together. Not distinguishing the pair, at least in writing, however, is considered an illiteracy, on the order of using the double negative or ain't; for this reason, the distinction is artificially maintained. The spelling of 'laid' is itself irregular, and more than once I've had to correct myself (it's in the class of mixing up your itses), which makes the pair lay/lie my candidate for the least 'regular' verb in English.
Then, does English attr. left (German link, Russian levyj) belong to the same initial (maybe pre-PIE) stem? If so we get a double opposition: ; left - right (spatial aspect) &nb sp; &n bsp; to lie - right ('correct' - moral aspect)< font size=+1> Besides that right-stem has juridical aspect (Russian pravo), ethical aspect (Russian pravda) and the meaning of a direction (German Richtung, Russian na-prav-lenie). I belive p- in Russian words is the residue of the prefix po-. Is it correct?Then, does first (Russian pervyj) belong to the same group?
I cannot cite the literature, but various psychological associations made between left-handedness and right-handedness cuts across many unrelated languages and cultures. In some cultures, the left hand is ritually unclean (e.g., Arab culture, as I understand, as this is the hand you use to 'wipe yourself'); this puts left-handers at something of a disadvantage. As athletes, however, southpaws have a certain advantage, as in baseball. Because most humans are right handed, the industrial world is designed around this fact, and lefties are at an additional disadvantage: left-handers, so I've read, suffer a disporportionate number of work-related injuries. In English we have the distinction between 'dextrous' and 'sinister'. In heraldry, a bar sinister represents bastardy.The association of 'correctness' and 'righteousness' with the right hand suggests a prejudice against left-handers, as indeed from time-to-time and place-to-place, there has been. I don't think any of this is particularly Indo-European, but represents a human universal.
Mark Odegard. < html>
The association of 'right' with 'good' and 'left' with 'bad' is indeed a universal, whatever the explanation. Other parallel pairs include 'even/odd' and 'light/dark'. By the way, English left and Russian levyj are not cognate, they just happen to have the same initial consonant. Latin laevus 'left; also unlucky, unprofitable, left-handed, foolish' is related to the Russian word, associations and all.Lie 'recline' -- lezhat', and lie 'tell lies' -- lgat' are related pairwise, but represent two different PIE roots: *legh/logh 'recline' and *leugh/lough/lugh 'tell lies', which do not have a common etymology. Both their falling together in the Modern English present tense and their phonetic near-identity in Russian are accidental. Russian lozh 'a lie' is from older *lugh-j-, while forms like polozhit' 'lay down' contain historical *logh-eje-. The Old English verbs were licgan 'recline' and leogan 'tell lies' (pronounced more or less lidge-an and leh-uh-yan).The confusion involving lie and lay is understandable, as the two are historically related. The former goes back to PIE *leghe- 'lie', while lay is etymologically a regular causative derived from it: *logheje- 'make lie = lay' (plus some minor complications in Germanic). The formal (and semantic) relation is the same as between sit and set, or rise and raise. Now the English past tense derives from the PIE perfect, in which the root vowel was o in the singular, e.g. le-logh-e 'he has lain'. This is why its vocalism HAPPENS TO BE the same as that of the causative. In Old English the two paradigms were still kept apart thanks to different inflectional endings, but after the endings were dropped the two lay's fell together. The complete fusion of the two verbs in the future is quite likely; this has in fact happened e.g. in the case of hang (transitive) and hang (intransitive). The first was once a weak verb, the second a strong one, hence the doublet hanged/hung, with a redistribution of meaning in modern times.I'm not sure about the origin of Slavic prav- (but I can check that). Per-vyj is from the same root as fir-st, as well as Gk. pro:-tos and Latin pr-imus. They all contain PIE zero-grade *prx- plus different suffixes, usually expressing the superlative degree or just adjective-forming. The root *perx-/*porx means '(push) forward', hence Latin and Greek pro:, English for, forth and Russian pered.Piotr