--- In nostratic@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> ... The Polish word for 'sight' is wzrok < *vU-zor-k- (the same
*zork- that gives Czech zrak; the Czech meaning 'face' is simply a
loan-translation of German Gesicht). ...
It's actually something even more trivial, though quite instructive.
I have consulted all the dictionaries of Czech I could find to see
if "face" is an authentic by-meaning of <zrak>, and it turns out that
<zrak> means ONLY "sight, vision", just like the corresponding Polish
word. The meaning "face" is Patrick Ryan's figment, most likely a
mistranslation of Pokorny's German gloss.
Let me add that in Serbian, for instance, <zrak> means "ray, a beam
of light".
Piotr