Re: [tied] Re: slavic "dalto"

----- Original Message -----
From: "Sergejus Tarasovas" <S.Tarasovas@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, April 03, 2003 4:24 PM
Subject: RE: [tied] Re: slavic "dalto"


> How would you account for OCS (not RCS) <odole^ti> 'to get the upper
hand, prevail over' < *'to get one's share' (and its Serbo-Croatian,
Slovenian and Old Czech counterparts) then? Doesn't it look like a
desubstantive?

The semantic association between conjectural *'get one's share' and 'defeat' is shaky. Polish also has the verb stem *-dola-, now only with prefixes (<podol/ac'> 'succeed', <zdol/ac'> 'be able to', <zdolny> 'gifted, apt', <nieudolny> 'clumsy'). The central concept seems to be efficiency or aptness. I'm not convinced there's a real connection with *dolja. It could be argued that *dolja may also mean 'good luck' (and this is closer to 'success'), but the clearly fatalistic implications of *dolja as opposed to the active and purposeful effort implied by *dole^ti/*dolati make me remain sceptical.

Piotr