Rola etymologii w rekonstrukcji językowego obrazu świata

Abstract

The role of etymology in the reconstruction of the linguistic world view The author assumes that etymological analyses are “ethnolinguistically relevant” because by reconstructing the motivation of names, etymology allows one to reach the methods of linguistic conceptualization of phenomena and objects. He discusses the words świat ‘world’, kwiat ‘flower’, and gwiazda ‘star’ (endorsing Brückner’s and Sławski’s thesis that they all belong to a single etymological nest), and adduces examples of proverbs, riddles, and folk songs where the semantics of ‘world’, ‘flower’, and ‘star’ are joined, to demonstrate the benefits of directing etymological analyses to historically documented texts. Apart from phonetic arguments, the common element is the connotation of ‘brightness’, i.e. what makes it possible to look and to see.

Keywords

• kognitywna etnolingwistyka
• etymologia
• językowy obraz świata
• kwiat
• gwiazda