From: Mate Kapović
Message: 28811
Date: 2003-12-28
----- Original Message -----
From: "Piotr Gasiorowski" <piotr.gasiorowski@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, December 28, 2003 2:30 AM
Subject: Re: [tied] RE: etyma for Crãciun, RomanianforChristmas
> 28-12-03 02:08, Mate Kapovic wrote:
>
>
> > But there is no such word in Croatian or Serbian. Only as somekind of a
name
> > not necessarily related, not in the meaning Christmas. And Bulgarian
also
> > has a name like krac^un. The meaning Christmas is attested in Ukrainian
and
> > Rusinian (Slovak dialect) if I am not mistaking.
>
> The problem is, Bulgarian (+ OCS) has *tj > *s^t, and East Slavic has
> *kortj- > *koroc^-. If the Slavic form is indeed *krac^- with _old_ *ra
> (not from mliquid metathesis), it can't be related to *kort(-Uk)-
> 'short'. The only solution I see is a wandering loan from a dialect
> related to Serbo-Croatian or Slovene that had the word.
I found some data. It seems that I wasn't right about *krat7k7.
Bulg. has kracˇun "Christmas Eve (besides other meanings)", Slovak
kracˇún/kracˇunˇ"Christmas", Old Russian korocˇun6, Ukr. kracˇun, kerecˇun
and some other forms etc. All forms cited have a meaning related to
Christmas. The etymology probably comes from Slavic *kork7, *korcˇiti "to
step, to walk" and semantics probably goes something like "Christmas = a new
step". Not all Slavic lgs have a religious meaning but the correspondences
point to *cˇ not to *tj so my first guess was wrong but the word is
definitely Slavic. (So DEX is wrong :-))
Mate