LIETUVIŲ KALBOTYROS KLAUSIMAI, XXXIV (1994)

LIETUVIŲ KALBOS TARMĖS IR JŲ TYRINĖJIMAI

Notes. Reviews

Notes. Reviews

Giedrius SUBAČIUS

SIMONAS DAUKANTAS’S STRUBIS AND AUKLĖS

These notes aim to clarify the meanings of two words used by S. Daukantas.

The first word is — s t r u b i s. The masculine noun strubis in the Great Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language (LKŽ XIII 997) has only a one-line entry: “strùbis m. (2) LKK IV 306 (S. Dauk.) elbow”. Thus, it is recorded from just one source, Jonas Kruopas’s article “S. Daukantas’s lexicographic works,” published in “Questions of Lithuanian Linguistics,” and was taken from S. Daukantas’s “Polish-Lithuanian Dictionary.” J. Kruopas lists it among obsolete words with the meaning “elbow.” In S. Daukantas’s dictionary, vol. I, p. 639, the entry reads: “Lokietek, atkune, strubis. Lokietki, tokcie, atkunes”. J. Kruopas apparently took the words elbow and strubis to be synonyms. However, as the overall structure of Daukantas’s dictionary shows, these could also have been given as different meanings of the Polish word.

Daukantas copied the Polish-word register of his dictionary from Stanislaw Ropelewski’s Polish-French dictionary. It is therefore possible to reconstruct the word’s meanings from it.

Ropelewski translates Lokietek into French as nain “dwarf,” pygmée “dwarf, pygmy,” and bout d’homme “a very short person.” Since the meaning of the homonym strubis, -ė in LKŽ is also given, on the basis of the so-called M. Niedermann dictionary, as “someone who is short/stumpy,” and the adjective strubas, -a “short; small” is also known from living speech, it would apparently be appropriate to assign Daukantas’s strubiui the meaning “a short person, a dwarf.” Although Ropelewski’s entry goes on to explain: pl. Lokietki, (dim. de Lokcie), petits coudes “small elbows,” this does not mean that the word strubis ever had the meaning “elbow.”

Thus, Daukantas’s strubis should be considered an obsolete word, an archaism, with the meaning “a short person, a dwarf,” not “elbow.”

The second word is a u k l ė s. In the aforementioned article, J. Kruopas also lists aukles “shoes” among the obsolete words in S. Daukantas’s Dictionary. Daukantas’s entry is brief: Kamasze, aukles (Vol. 1. P. 468). LKŽ I² 474 gives four meanings of the word auklė (alongside the homonym auklė, “a carrying cloth, a childminder”): 1. “a cord for tying a leather shoe or bast shoe to the foot; a strap”; 2. “a rope, a cord”; 3. “a stocking without a foot or with a short ankle”; 4. “a woven cloth”.

In the aforementioned Ropelewski dictionary, from which Daukantas also copied the word Kamasze, only one meaning is given — guêtres “gaiters.” Thus S. Daukantas probably did not intend the meaning “shoes.” Here and elsewhere in his writings, auklės var-

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…are used in the third (hence “getrai”) and fourth meanings in LKŽ; cf. Daukantas’s dictionary: Pótkamasze, pùsaukles (Vol. 2, p. 474) – French demiguetres; Nagolenica, aukle. arba karejwio czebatas (Vol. 2, p. 22) – French cuissard (“a thigh-piece, the part of armor covering the leg”); and also a sentence from Daukantas’s “Būdas”: wytóro sau stajbius witnonomis tejpat joudomis aukliemis nu kóksznių lig pat kėlių (p. 40). It may also be compared with an entry in Daukantas’s notes on F. Nesselmann’s dictionary. Aukle, pl. aukles f. (Questions of Linguistics, 1961, vol. 4, p. 313), where S. Daukantas corrected only the form given by Nesselmann, Auklys, but not its meaning. Nesselmann gives the meaning as follows: blau und schwarz gestreifte wollene Bänder, welche die Frauen statt der Strümpfe um ihre Waden wickeln (“blue-and-black-striped woolen bands that women wrap around their calves instead of wearing stockings”). Thus Daukantas’s auklėms should not be assigned the meaning “shoes.”

ETYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARY OF THE LATVIAN LANGUAGE

In 1992, the Riga publishing house “Avots” published a two-volume etymological dictionary of the Latvian language compiled by Konstantīns Karulis (Latviešu etimoloģijas vārdnīca. I. A-O. II. P-Ž. Rīga “Avots”). The dictionary’s academic editor was Nikolai Andreyev, a linguist from St. Petersburg. Its reviewers were Simas Karaliūnas of Vilnius and Vladimir Toporov of Moscow. Among other things, the work was also defended as a habilitation doctoral dissertation in Riga in 1993.

This was, of course, an exceptional event in Baltic linguistics: not only Latvian but also Lithuanian linguists, as well as Balticists in other countries more generally, had long awaited such a work. Until then, the best source on Latvian etymologies had been Jānis Endzelīns’s notes in Kārlis Mīlenbahs’s Latvian dictionary and the supplements to that dictionary (Latviešu valodas vārdnīca. Red., pap., turpinājis J. Endzelins. I–IV. Rīga, 1923–1932; Endzelīns J., Hauzenberga E. Papildinājumi un labojumi K. Mūlenbacha Latviešu valodas vārdnīcai. I-II. Rīga, 1934–1946). A short etymological dictionary of Latvian had been published by Nikolajs Lapinis (Latviešu vārdu etimoloģija. I–III. Rīga, 1967–1975). There is evidence that in the 1870s the author of the first scholarly grammar of Latvian, the German-born Latvian linguist and pastor in Dobele, August Bielenstein (Bielenstein, 1827–1907), also planned to write an etymological dictionary of Latvian. Before the Second World War, the prominent Latvian publisher Ansis Gulbis had resolved to publish an etymological dictionary. To carry out this work, J. Endzelīns had even recommended the linguist Žanis Grauds (1896–1971). In recent decades, Benjamin Jegers (Jegers), a graduate of the universities of Riga and Göttingen who later taught in Sweden and the United States, may have been the most successful contributor to Latvian etymology. Unfortunately, however, this linguist, who earned most of his living through Germanic studies, lacked the means to devote himself exclusively to the study of Latvian etymology. An especially valuable resource for anyone writing an etymological dictionary of Latvian is, of course, E. Fraenkel’s “Lithuanian Etymological Dictionary” (Litauisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Heidelberg-Göttingen, 1955–1965).

For people less familiar with Latvian culture, some surprise…

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