Re: Brugmann's Law

On Pet, siječanj 18, 2008 2:48 pm, Piotr Gasiorowski wrote:

> 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.

In Croatian it's "jebo ti pas mater" or, not so strongly, "jebo te pas"
(the latter is more, as you put it, "shock-exlamation").

> 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.

Hungarians tend to use kurva for practically everything, even in phrases
like "kurva jó" - "bloody good". We have a similar development in Croatian
- we can for instance use "kurac" (cock) in the meaning "nothing" (similar
to English "shit").

Mate