Thursday, February 18, 2010

slowár


Jazykovedný ústav Ľudovíta Štúra Slovenskej Akadémie Vied, the main body in charge of studying and regulating the Slovak language, has recently gone through the trouble of digitizing Anton Bernolák's post-humously published magnum opus, the six-volume Slowár Slowenskí Češko-Laťinsko-Ňemecko-Uherskí (Lexicon Slavicum Bohemico-Latino-Germanico-Ungaricum), and putting it online. Get it while it's hot / still there. In what I think is a lovely touch, the text on this particular part of the JÚĽŠ website is in Bernolák's Slovak (essentially Western Slovak koine, as opposed to Štúr and Hodža's Central-dialect-based standard which eventually prevailed) and Bernolák's orthography. You will notice the German-like capitalization of nouns, 'g' for the glide [j] (ge = copula.3SG) and 'ǧ' for the voiced velar plosive [g] (Pluǧin = 'plugin'). And just in case you want a break from looking for the naughty words (like the one above), here's two more of Bernolák's linguistic writings from my personal collection: Orthographia (which is just what the title suggests) and Etymologia (which is actually an awesome treatise on derivational morphology and compounding followed by a Latin-Slovak glossary of linguistic terms, a list of Slovak proverbs with translations in Latin and a brief Slovak-Latin-Hungarian-German dictionary organized by semantic fields). Enjoy.

Monday, February 15, 2010

trend

... let's start one:

hurkil (ḫurkil) (n.), nom.-acc. sg. hur-ki-el (KUB XIII 30, 3 and 7), hu-u-ur-ki-el, hu-ur-ki-il, hu-u-ur-ki-il in Code 2:87-91, 95-96, denoting severe sexual offences such as bestiality and incest... (1)

And while we're at it, I'm sure the following bit from KUB 17.27 iii (2) will come in handy, too:

(12) ... ANŠE-aš še!-ḫur-ri-eš-ke-ed-du
(13) [n=a-at]=kán GU4-uš kam-mar-ši-eš-ke-ed-du

"... Let the donkey piss on it, let the cow shit [on it]!"

1. PUUHVEL, Jan: Hittite Etymological Dictionary. Volume 3. Words beginning with H. Berlin; New York: Mouton De Gruyter, 1991, p. 401
2. KLOEKHORST, Alwin:
Etymological Dictionary of the Hittite Inherited Lexicon. Leiden: Brill, 2008, p. 403. One more cite on p. 743 with slightly different transcription.