Selected entries from the etymological dictionary of common Slavic poetic formulas against Indo-European background

Abstract

We proposed a corpus approach to the study of the poetics of related Indo-European folklore traditions. Since in folk poetics, lines’ clausules play a primary role in organizing the text, acting as "nests" of formulas and syntactic organizers of lines, we proposed to focus on the reconstruction of the class of words that could be used in the string clausule in the Common Slavic, and probably the common Indo-European period. In this way, we can come to the reconstruction of the core of the thesaurus of formulas. Elsewhere we have given a list of common Slavic clause words. The task of the present publication is to trace the development of the discovered formulas against the common Indo-European background. For this purpose, the following texts were annotated according to the same principle (with double slash // the boundaries of lines were marked): “Iliad” and “Odyssey”, “Rig Veda”, Latvian mythological songs. Then these texts were processed with a free software tool AntConc. As a result, for each tradition, its own classes of clausule words were found, which were compared with the Proto-Slavic ones.
The next stage involves comparing the main formulaic phrases found in the clauses of different Slavic traditions with etymologically related or semantically equivalent words of the ancient Greek, Latvian, and Vedic traditions, which also have a high frequency in the clausules.
The presence of etymologically related words in different traditions in the clausule provides valuable material for a comparative and historical study of poetic syntax, and more broadly – syntactic distribution and compatibility of proto-language units, since most syntactic patterns were lexically related, that is, they could only be filled with certain classes of vocabulary (Stepanov 6 ). Therefore, the comparison of clauses is a kind of databank for finding out the distribution of certain words in a sentence, namely at the beginning and at the end, in two poetically most significant positions.
Slavic clausules *gordъ, *konь, *mati, *slovo, *govoriti, *moldъ, *golva, *godъ, *polje, *vino, *lĕto, *gospodь, *morje, *dvorъ, and *zemja were analysed.