OK, let us skip the question why anyone would compare St. John with glow-worm? Midsummer (St. John's eve) is a festival of fire and light; bonfire and torches are lit everywhere.
Bulgarian have the same word for both 'holy' and 'world' - свят (svjat). Why?
Serbo-Croatian (ekavian) too: svet 'world', svet 'holy'.
It seems you neglected some of my previous notes:
- Russ./Bulg. сияние (sijanie) 'nimbus, aureole'; this world comes from *sinut (shine) and if it is derived from the Proto_Slavic
*sъlnьсе (solnce, slunce, sunce; Gr. ἥλιος; Dor.
ἀ̄έλιος) we may presuppose that the sound /v/ in svjat/svet and svetec (saint; Gr.
άγιος, άγγελος?) is a prothetic consonat (maybe something like *suinut --> svanut, svitnout, svetat', svitat 'to dawn'; Pol.
świtanie 'dawn')
- What about Cz. svatozář 'nimbus, halo'? Compare svat- and svet- (světec 'saint') once again. Maybe we could say that Cz. svatozář is 'saint shining' (Cz. ozářit 'shine') and maybe the name Svetozar (Svetlozara 'white beam/dawn') is unrelated to it?
- Rusian svetilo (светило) means 'light source, star, light'; similar is in Bulgarian (heavenly body, luminary), but in Serbian Orthodox Church svetilo is 'saint' or 'saintly place'; cf. Serbo-Cr. svetilište 'sanctuary, chancel' Russ. святилище; Bul. светилище (svetilishte); this implies that Slavic 'saint' may have been understood as 'light in darkness'?
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
From: gpiotr@...
Date: Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:44:23 +0200
Subject: Re: [tied] Re: Afro-Asiatic substrate (re "folk" "polk" "pulkas")
On 2009-07-31 00:17, Anatoly Guzaev wrote:
Modern Czech does not preserve nasal vowels. Polish does, and it has
<s'wie,ty> 'holy' (with nasal /eN/) but <s'wiat> 'world' and <s'wiatl/o>
'light' (no nasal vowel in any variety of Polish). I know of _no_ Slavic
language in which 'world/light' has "a strong nasalisation" . Czech has a
consistent distinction between e^ < *e^ and a < *eN. The word
<svatojanek> refers to St. John (glowworms appear about that time of the
year), not to light.
Piotr
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