Indo-European linguistics and classical philology
E. A. Parina. Semantic shift ‘hard’ > ‘steel’ in Insular Celtic languages (pp. 771–788)
Author
E. A. Parina (The Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences)
Keywords\n Welsh, Irish, Latin, semantic shift, steel, contact phenomena in Insular Celtic languages
Pages\n 771–788
Summary\n
This article discusses the semantic shift that can be observed in the Welsh word dur. The word is encountered already in Old Welsh (glossing the Latin adjective dirus and translated as ‘hard, cruel’) and lives on in Modern Welsh meaning ‘steel’, while Middle Welsh texts reflect the polysemy stage. It has been suggested that this polysemy was borrowed from Latin where supposedly an ellipsys from ferrum dūrum has taken place. The same semantic shift, however, is attested in Middle Irish crúaid ‘hard’, often nominalised as ‘steel’. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the relationship between the shifts in these three languages. First, the Celtic *dūro- could either be analysed as a loanword from Latin or else could be taken as an inherited Celtic root. It could even be suggested that the ‘steel’ sense could be a part of this root’s meaning in Celtic. If *dūro- is a Latin loanword both in British languages and in Irish, different scenarios for the development of the polysemy of the Irish crúaid ‘hard’ could be suggested.
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