Re: etyma for Crãciun,RomanianforChristmas

On Mon, Dec 29, 2003, at 12:20 AM, Mate wrote:

> Here we go:
> except Croatian there are also Bulgarian kracˇun "Christmas Eve; 8th
> or 21th
> of July; sommer/winter solstices", dialectally also "big foot". Slovene
> kracˇun "wedge", Slovakian kracˇún, kracˇunˇ "Christmas", Old Russian
> korocˇun7, korocˇjun7 "prechristmas fast", Russian karacˇun
> "solstices; 12th
> of December; st. Spiridon", dial. karacˇun "Christmas ceremony",
> "Christmas
> fast", "sudden death", "evil spirit, demon, child that crawls".
> Ukr. kracˇun, kerecˇun, krecˇun, gerecˇun, grecˇun "a bun made on 24th
> of
> December", Belorussian dial. (Polesie) karacˇun "something bent; bent
> wood;
> short man; man with twisted legs".
> Also Albanian kërcun "log" (cf. Croatian Badnjak "Christmas Eve"~
> badanj
> "log").
> Semantics "which treads, steps, strides" (> "big foot" etc.) > "death,
> depart", "leaving, going from the sun to the winter etc." also "a new
> step,
> a step into smth new, a new beginning".
>
> So we have the word in various meanings

Thanks for the rich list above. I for one actually see not "various
meanings," but only two major ones: (1) the sacral, (2) the prophane
pertaining to "twig/branch/secondary stem" which is "twisted/bent".
(BTW, in Romanian a wo/man "with twisted legs," actually an O-legged
one, is <crãcãnat>, which is a past participle of the vb. <a crãcãná>,
< masc. <crãcan> or fem. <cracã>, synonyms of fem. <creangã> "branch,
twig").

Now then, I'd ask myself why on earth is there a connection between
Christmas (or whatever else Solstice ritual, but we see it's chiefly
Christmas, and less or not at all the Summer fires as well) and a
fragment of a tree (a log or whatever)? This is why I put the question
in a previous post whether there is knowledge of any pre-Christian
or Christian folklore tradition to... justify the selection of a
word that in Slavic and Germanic (cf. ON <kriki> "bend" > Engl. <creek>)
idioms convey the ideas "a secondary stem, part of a bifurcation" PLUS
"to bend, twist."

For, if there is none, then I'd be tempted to think of...
Volksetymologie: to Slavs arrived in the Balkans the neo-
Romance [kr&tSune] might have been assimilable to their
lexem pertaining to "twisted twigs & logs."

> (which would be very strange if it
> were a late loan from Romance) in Croatian, Bulgarian, Slovene,
> Slovakian,
> Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian.

Methinks, exactly this could lead to this assumption.
The spreading of notions, beliefs and fads from some
cultural-religious center (where St. Cyrill's and
Method's disciples worked) might have constituted
(actually did) the appropriate framework for this
kind of "wandering word."

> The semantics itself is a point to its Slavic origin, I
> think and the connection with *kork7 is pretty clear.

IMHO, in this case we need a better... Korkenzieher in
order to be able to talk to the knowledgeable Djinni. :-))

> Mate

George