From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 10788
Date: 2001-10-31
----- Original Message -----From: Sergejus TarasovasSent: Wednesday, October 31, 2001 11:40 AMSubject: [tied] Re: Vrddhi in sigmatic aorist> Can you state that you've carefully analyzed the semantics of all reflexes of *xod-/*s^Id- in all Slavic languages and have reconstructed it's original semantics (not just on a quantitative basis, of course). I admit I haven't, but at least in Russian a professional <xo'dit> 'goes' rather than <pla'vajet> 'sails' in a ship, in Old Russian <xoditi> prevails absolutely when the semantics 'sail' is to be denoted.Of course I haven't (I've had no time for even a cursory overview), but I think we can exclude what is after all a kind of expressive technical slang ("treading the waves"). Sailors are busy people and they tend to spend their time on deck running up and down :). My (falsifiable but hitherto unfalsified) impression is that *xod- is definitely associated with _active_, not _passive_ movement (see below).> Ship is a vehicle, and the situation when an old semantics is conserved "on the perifery" with some specific meaning is quite possible typologically.Just a contribution to comparative Slavic semantics: in Polish (and I believe in Russian too) <chodzi> (as well as <idzie>) is used primarily of human or animal walkers, then secondarily of clocks and engines (now also of trains, trams and coaches, etc.), and frequently of ships as well -- i.e. vehicles and machines that "move by themselves" without being visibly drawn, and by virtue of that resemble living beings. In Polish, however, only a ship may "walk", not a sailor or a passanger aboard her. And certainly a wagon or a cart never "walks" (we use <jedzie>, not <idzie/chodzi>).
> But I meant "going by sitting" - the thing we do every day driving a car. I personally don't walk in my car (probably because I don't have a limousine).
But you wouldn't use <xoditi> with reference to driving (or being driven in) a car, would you?Piotr