Re: Brugmann's Law

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 51398
Date: 2008-01-18

Mate Kapović wrote:

> Well, "I'll fuck your mother" definitely *sounds* like a curse... In
> Croatia, we have a version of this one including the dog.

May you be "blessed/cursed" by a dog? We have it too (<pies cie,
jebal/>), and the phrase must be quite old. Samuel Linde's monumental
Dictionary of the Polish Language (1815) has it (Linde was an undaunted
lexicographer, too much in love with words to regard anything as taboo).

"Be thou cursed with [my] word/hand" is not used in Polish (except as a
generally comprehensible Russian phrase, left untranslated). Our
equivalent is <kurwa twoja mac'> (lit. 'the whore is your mother'), used
in full or elliptically slimmed down to the first word as a general-use
"shock-exclamation". This too, seems to derive from a plain insult
rather than a religious formula.

Piotr