Meanderings...

I've found over my few years that I've known quite a few people whose first language was something Slavic. However, I've never learned much of any particular slavic language, and it's starting to feel a bit embarassing. There's "Lord have mercy", "Господы помелуй", and maybe I could count camels (верблюды!) in the desert (пуштыне), up to about five (what fun, O Swann!). Oh, and I once was asked to learn and sing that choral interpolation on top of Tchaikovsky's 1812, "Spare, O Lord, Thy people and bless Thine inheritance:" "спаси, господы, люди твоя, и благословы достояне твое..."

Anyways, gradually more and more embarassing. Modern Cyrillic script, though, is still a bit weird (to say nothing of the older script actually developed by ... S. Cyril...). So I've decided to work via Polish, and recently bookmarked a table of ancient words and added "Gdasnk 1881" to my Xiphos collection and started on the Ewangelia według św. Jana, because it is probably my favourite writing in any language, and... oh, my goodness!

One could go on (someone already has?) for several dissertations, I'd bet, on the network of words around [SVI]; for instance, Polish has "światłość" (Lat: lux) and "świadectwo" (Lat: "in testimonium") and "świat" (Lat: "[hunc] mundum"... I think because it's what we can see? ... ) and "święty" (Lat: "sanctus"... ok, I pulled this one out of Isaiah, another favourite).

And then there was A colloquial paper about slavic roots (and loan-words) in languages we usually don't think of as slavic at all; that paper suggests that the very Latin "videre" (and hence view, vision...) hail from the same [SVI] family by elision of the initial "s"... which shows up in Polish as "widzieć" (to see), independently of Latin (says the colloquial paper). I'm rather thinking that "Sanctus" is another, or better, of these. (Within Latin, it's hard to connect with its Greek counterpart, "ἅγιος"... does anyone know of any other pairs of words connected by a [nc] ←→ [γ]? There is the pair (septem ←→ ἑπτὰ) for matching an "s" with an aspirated vowel... and then is one of them older???)

There are also some neat jokes one can play: a small egg, in Polish, is "jajko" which sounds "yolky"; the Word that made every thing was "Słowo" which you might like to think has something in common with "λογος"; or "żona" with "γυνή"; or "kora" with "écorce" (French for "rind" or "bark"... no idea where English "bark" comes from...). One must respect the fierce "zwierz".

And now this note is getting długi and my head is feeling tłusty. Time to go back to mathematics, I think.