Matters of Life, Death and Sex

Matters of Life, Death and Sex
November 19

муж, мужчина. < Old Russian mąžь, < *mangio-, an extension from something like Gothic manna, English man. It is possibly related to *men- ‘think, mind’, as in память ‘memory.’ Thinking man, homo putans, a putative man.

любовь, Czech líbý, líbit se ‘please’, любить, Czech líbat ‘to kiss’. Also любой ‘any at all, any you please’. This is 15th cent. English lief, as in ‘I had as lief go’, Latin libet. Old Indo-european -*eu- monophthongized in Slavic to -ju-, hence *leub- may be posited as an etymon. What Russian word comes, then, from *leud-? Люди. German Leute.
жена. (женщина < жен– ск–ин–). Gothic qino, Old English cwene, English queen. Greek gune. The postulation is *g(u)ena. This is a good example of how Slavic changes initial primary consonants to alveolar palatals very early on. Cf. also gynecology.

карандаш. This is an example of a word from Turkotatar, unrelated to the word ‘pencil’ in other Western languages. In Turkic it meant ‘black stone, graphite’.

дети. This is an old IE root with metonymic transference of meaning; originally the root meant ‘to suck’, as Greek thele ‘breast’, Latin felare, Gothic daddjan. Slavic has доить дою ‘to suck’. The original form was a collective деть ‘one’s offspring’, with a jat’ in the stem (see my blog on Tsar of all the Russias). The word in the singular became дитё, дитя in dialects and is replaced by ребёнок in the literary language, itself from рабя < раб, ‘child of a slave, a serf’. The plural ребята is not the plural of this word but rather means ‘lads, guys, fellows’ as a group designation. The lengthened stem in this word is that to be found in the singular and plural of the words for the young of animals, as котёнок, котята ‘kitten’, жеребёнок, жеребята ‘foal’, with the singular originally masculine and the plural neuter in gender. It is still a productive formation today.

жить, живу ‘live’ is found in Old Slavic; Czech and other West Slavic languages have a stem in -j-, as in žíti, žiji, žiješ. Lithuanian gýti ‘be whole, healthy; live’ shows the original Balto-Slavic g-. Cf. Latin vivus, vivo ‘alive, live’, and Greek Bios, all related and all very ancient words. Note the Russian word for life, жизнь, with its unusual suffix. Czech has život, which in Russian has the synecdochal meaning ‘belly’, the seat of life. The Czech derivative živůtek means ‘corset’, an extension of the belly. And, for further evidence that identical roots in neighboring Slavic languages can bear strikingly different meanings, note Czech žízeň ‘thirst’, in Old Czech, it meant ‘abundant harvest, grain’; cf. Russian жито ‘grain, cereal’. Russian жизнь is ‘life’. ‘Thirst’ in Russian is жажда, used in a figurative sense; “I’m thirsty’ is пить хочется.

смерть ‘death’, смерш < смерть шпионам ‘death to spies’ (dative). This is an old, old word, more evocative in Russian than in Czech, which has the rapidly pronounced monosyllabic smrt, while Polish has the juicier śmierć, with palatal fricatives, Czech smrt seems to come from losing the jers in Common Slavic sъmьrtь, although of course it was more complicated than that. This is Latin mors, gen. mortis, The Slavic su- is possibly from the prefixal su- ‘good’, hence ‘a good natural death’. Cf. счастье ‘happiness, good fortune’, with the same prefix. Slavic death is feminine, so that she is not depicted as a grim reaper but as a witch-like figure. So the Russian for Emily’s poem would be: Because I could not stop for death, She kindly stopped for me. Can anyone translate this for me?

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