From: Mate Kapović
Message: 28896
Date: 2003-12-29
----- Original Message -----
From: "m_iacomi" <m_iacomi@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, December 29, 2003 2:31 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] RE: etyma for Crãciun,RomanianforChristmas
> Actually this is another possibility.
>
> The word "crucial" in the above text would be perfectly justified
> if one does not admit the alternative explanations of polnoglasie as
> given by you (Hungarian intermediate) and Bernecker (reconstruction
> by analogy in Russian). While these possibilities are not refutable
> ab initio, I tend to agree with Mate on this point and to consider
> the ancient Russian form as crucial evidence.
> The question is: "crucial evidence" for _what_ exactly?
> The answer is: for presence of the word in Russian (Slavic) before
> this phonetical phenomenon (polnoglasie) occured.
> That does not imply the word was genuinely Slavic but only it got
> in the language(s) earlier than polnoglasie.
But Latin creatione- and Romanian crăciun have CrVC- and not CVrC- which is
what East Slavic i vouching. *That* is why it is not possible to derive
Slavic *korcˇun7 from some offspring of creatione-. Piotr's idea about
Hungarian is, as I showed, very unlikely possible because of numerous
reasons (including accent, -ará- in Hung. etc.). Later anaptyxis in East
Slavic is also ad hoc and semantics in Slavic shows it has both sacred and
non-sacred meaning and it has a plausable etymology. So there is no reason
to assume it is borrowed from Romance. For Romanian I accept the possibility
of mixing with creatione- or smth.
> The Slavic origin hypothesis (Weigand, Kniezsa, et al.) asserts a
> meaning `winter solstice` for the Slavic original word, derived from
> another Slavic word meaning `short(er)` through `shorter daytime`
> associated to winter solstice.
You have obviously not read what Sergei and I wrote. The idea of "short" was
only smth Piotr and I were joggling around before looking at all the
evidence. The *right* etymology is *kork7 "to step".
Mate