Original scientific paper
The Čakavian hust ‘a bush, a shrub’, Kajkavian husta/hosta ‘a forest; shrubs, bushes, an overgrowth, a thicket’
Wieslaw Borys
; Pracownia Języka Prasłowiańskiego Instytutu Slawistyki PAN
Abstract
This etymological contribution considers a group of lexemes which are
closely related phonetically and semantically: Čakavian hust ‘a bush, a shrub;
a degenerated hemp bush’, husti pl. ‘bushes, an overgrowth, a thicket’ (on
the Istrian Peninsula), 15th–16th c. Old Croatian hust ‘a multitude, a plethora,
a swarm, a band’, Kajkavian husta/hosta ‘forest’, in early sources also ‘a forest
to be cut; bushes, an overgrowth, a thicket’; the closest equivalents in Slovene
hộsta (also hộst in dialects) ‘a forest; bushes, an overgrowth, a thicket; dry
twigs’. The alternation of the root vowel u/o indicates the original *ǫ. Therefore,
the aforementioned words allegedly continue the proto-forms *chǫstъ
and *chǫsta. It is likely that the East Slavic name for ‘a bush / a thicket’ is
cognate with these words: Russian, Belarusian, and dialectal Ukrainian kust,
with a syllable-onset *k- without an s-mobile. This comparison enables us to
reconstruct the earlier Proto-Slavic forms *(s)kǫstъ and *(s)kǫsta, whereas
*(s)kǫstъ may be derived from an earlier *(s)kǫp-t-, with the suffix *-to- and
with the development of the consonantal group -pt- > -st-. This could have
been a derivative from Proto-Slavic *kǫpa ‘a curved, convex thing which
projects from the surrounding area’ (e.g. ‘a height, a group of trees, bushes,
which resembles a height’). In the form *(s)kǫsta, one may perceive a variant
of the suffix *-tā or an archaic collectivum with the suffix *-ā from *(s)kǫstъ.
Keywords
Croatian and Slavic etymology; Croatian dialect lexicon; Čakavian and Kajkavian dialect groups
Hrčak ID:
161722
URI
Publication date:
13.7.2016.
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