On Mon, Dec 29, 2003, at 03:17 PM, Mate wrote:
> Piotr's idea about Hungarian is, as I showed, very unlikely
> possible because of numerous reasons (including accent, -ará- in Hung.
> etc.).
Only for the sake of discussion (-: on the other hand,
esp. Russians seem (at least to me) to make of virtually
any [o] > [a], so why can't I assume that a thing such
as [karac^on] was perceived as... uneducated, so that
the scribblers concluded they had to put the "correct"
word on paper: <koro-...whatever>? Don't you find? ;-)
(I didn't get an answer referring to gorod, Volodimir
and the like, that stay in contrast with "clusterized"
grad, Vlad- etc. My question is: why this preference
in Eastern Slavic idioms? I got no idea about Slavic
languages, but my feeling says it must be an East-Slavic
feature.)
> So there is no reason to assume it is borrowed from Romance.
> For Romanian I accept the possibility of mixing with
> creatione- or smth.
A strong thing remains the Hungarian variant, karácsony.
AFAIK, it means Christmas only, i.e. there is no
log connotation to it (correct me if I'm wrong). Even
in Romanian, where there is a word family related to
all those <krak> family -- <cracã, crãcan, creangã> -,
nobody will establish a *natural* and *logical* connection
between <Crãciun> and these words. It is only the linguist
who does, and explains it to the rest of the "lay" people.
So, if there is no pre-Christian notion for which the
Slavic-Germanic <krak> vocabulary had been used, then
I for one assume in the case of Slavs (and only in their
case) Volksetymologie played the decisive role. (Therefore
Marius's hypothesis B seems to be a wee tad more plausible.)
BTW, Rum. <cracã, crãcan [esp. this one], creangã;
+ crac> are remote relatives of Engl. <crotch, crutch>,
Germ. <Krücke> as well. An interesting thing is this in
Romanian: the word for <Krücke, crutch> could have been
very well <crãcan>, but it wasn't to be. Instead, Romanians
preferred a Slavic loan, <cârjã> (regionally also <cârje>),
from Old Slav. kryz^i (hopefully, I give here a spelling
close to the real one) "cross". No Romanian native-speaker
without linguistics education knows that <cârjã> initially
means "cross" (in Romanian <cruce>), and that the words
used for thick twigs (and in the figurative sense for
other kind of bifurcations and secondary stems), <crãcan,
crac, cracã>, would better fit for the meaning "crutch, Krücke"
(semantically, phonologically, etymologically). Besides,
the hypothetic link <crãciun>-<cruce> I already mentioned.
I don't know whether it's worth taking into consideration,
maybe not. But it wouldn't be too spectacular: Hungarian
<kereszt> and <keresztény> come to my mind, i.e. "cross" and
"Christian," both from <Christus/Hristos>.
So, the ultimate PIE word would be then *ger, wouldn't it?
(which anyway covers the "bending, twisting" semantic part)
> Mate
George