Old Lithuanian plęšti ‘rejoice, jump in joy, dance’ may be interpreted as a back-formation from *plenšoti, a verb borrowed from Old Polish plęsać

Smoczyński, Wojciech

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Wojciech Smoczyński

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Old Lithuanian plęšti

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354 https://doi.org/10.15388/SBOL.2021.19Copyright © 2021 Wojciech Smoczyński. Published by Vilnius University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Old Lithuanian plęštiWojciech SmoczyńskiJagellonian University, Cracow, PolandAbstract. Old Lithuanian plęšti ‘rejoice, jump in joy, dance’ may be interpreted as a back-formation from *plenšoti, a verb borrowed from Old Polish plęsać.Keywords: borrowing, back-formation, primary vs secondary verb formationThe verb plęšti, plęšiu, plęšiau ‘rejoice, jump in joy, dance’ is only attested in Old Lithuanian monuments (Mažvydas, Bretkūnas). Knyga nobažnystės has – alongside <plęßti> – a variant with the vowel ą, <pląßti>: Tegul po jo veidu švenčiausiu upės pląšti ne perstoja 8312 ‘May rivers dance joyfully in the Lord’s presence’. Documentation is provided by ALEW 795 and Palio-nis (2004, 348). The spelling <ęsch> occasionally alternates with <ensch>, cf. from Bretkūnas’ Bible: <plensche> ‘(she) danced’ (a gloss for <schokineio>) and <o kaip... plenschimą ischwjda> ‘and when he saw the dancing’ (a gloss for <schokineghimą>). LKŽ accentuates plę̃šti, -iù, -iaũ.The etymology of the verb still remains controversial. Many scholars claim that the Lith. stem plęš- is inherited and related to Proto-Slavic *plęs-, cf. OCS plęsati, plęšǫ ‘dance’, Ru. pljasátь, -šú ‘dance a folk dance’, Cz. plesat, plesám ‘rejoice, cry with joy; dance’, OPol. plęsać, pląszę, Pol. pląsać, pląsam ‘dance, shuffle one’s feet; rejoice, jump in joy, clap one’s hands’, see Būga (1959, 516f.), Trautmann (1923, 225) (reconstructs a Proto-Balto-Slavic pres-ent *plenši̯ō), Vasmer (1955, 379), Fraenkel (1962, 619f.), Boryś (2005, 439). There are, however, certain circumstances that weaken the hypothesis that plęšti is of Balto-Slavic origin. First, PSl. *plęsati does not have any Indo-European counterparts, except for the alleged Lithuanian one. Go. plinsjan ‘dance’ with its p- and limited Germanic reach is better accounted for as a Slavicism, see  355 Vaillant 1966, 325 and ALEW 795. Second, Lith. plęšti is completely isolated in the Baltic family; there is no Latvian counterpart *plies- (cf. mìezu : Lith. męžù), nor any Old Prussian attestation. Third, the evidence provided by Old Lithuanian authors has no continuation in more recent times; in particular, it is not supported by Lithuanian dialectal material.1It should be borne in mind here that in the past at least two eminent authors rejected the Balto-Slavic origin of plęšti and instead considered it a borrowing from Slavic. Brückner (1927, 417) wrote s.v. pląs, plęsy, pląsać: «[OLith.] plęszti is suspicious as regards its native character». Vaillant (1966, 325) was the first to point out a Polish source of the borrowing, cf. «le lituanien plę̃šti, pląšti paraît être... un emprunt au polonais pląsze-, pląsać, ancien pląsze-, plęsać».As is well-known, the oldest Slavicisms in Lithuanian are of Belorussian or Old Polish origin. Assuming that the OLith. sequence ęS < *enS is a faithful rendering of the Slavic nasal vowel ę before a fricative, it is easier to match Lith. plęš-/*plenš- with the 15th-c. Old Polish form plęsać 1. ‘clap, hit one’s hands together’, 2. ‘jump, dance’ (Słownik staropolski VI, 148), than to OBr. pljasati (var. plesati) ‘dance, jump’, where the root vowel does not have a nasal resonance. As regards the difference š : s, it is due to generalization in the Lith-uanian paradigm of the consonant -š- characteristic of the Polish present form: pląszę, pląszesz, pląsze (cf. OBr. pljašu, OCS plęšǫ). The Lithuanian form is thus a kind of hybrid: its vocalism is that of the OPol. infinitive plęs-, Pol. pląs-, whereas its consonantism goes back to the Pol. present pląsz-.There is, however, a certain detail that makes it difficult for a student of Lithuanian ultimately to accept the status of plęšti, pląšti as a borrowing. It is the primary form of the verb under study.2 Specifically, verbs borrowed from Slavic are not usually disyllabic but trisyllabic, with the suffixes -yti or -oti corresponding to Sl. -iti, -ati, cf. e.g. slū̃žyti ‘serve’ (not *slūžti), pléntoti ‘tangle, e.g. a thread’ (not *plęsti). In Lithuanian transposition, OPol. plęsać, Pol. pląsać should have assumed the forms *plenšoti, *planšoti. That this is not the case might be due to the original transpositional forms *plenšoti, *planšoti 1 I ignore here the Žemaitian verb plenszti ‘talk a lot, complain, backbite’ (Būga (1959, 517), from Lituanica by Kossarzewski); its origin still remains undetermined.2 I owe this observation to Jurgis Pakerys (Vilnius).356 having been modified in Lithuanian; more precisely, they would have under-gone back-derivation to plęšti, pląšti. There does not seem to be an exact paral-lel for this alleged process in the class in -oti. On the other hand, one might point out two fairly certain quasiprimary formations in the class in -yti, cf. tróti ⇐ trõtyti ‘lose’ (from Br. trácicь) and tū́žti [įtū́žti ‘become angry’] ⇐ tū̃žyti ‘worry, be sad’ (from OBr. tužiti, Br. tužýcь).3Finally, one has to mention a synonymous word tañcius, tañčius ‘dance’, which is also a Slavicism in Old Lithuanian (i.a. in the texts of Daukša and Bretkūnas), and comes from OBr. tanecъ, -nca, Br. tánec, -nca (⇐ Pol. taniec, -ńca).The current explanation updates the entry plęšti included in LED 989, a work – let me add – to which Professor Axel Holvoet selflessly devoted his precious time and creative effort as an editor.AbbreviationsBr.  BelarusianCz. CzechGo. GothicOBr. Old BelarusianOCS Old Church SlavicOLith. Old LithuanianOPol. Old PolishPol. PolishPSl. Proto-SlavicRu. RussianSl.  Slavic3 N.B. The OLith. Slavicism dboti (Chyliński) ‘be careful about, care about, be wary of’, which is exceptional owing to its disyllabic structure, becomes trisyllabic as dabóti and atbóti; these forms place the borrowing in the verbal class in -oti. Superficially, this may appear as if the transposition were a phonetic change with the aim of resolving a foreign word-initial cluster (anaptyxis: db- > dab-? prothesis db- ⇒ adb-?). However, this is in fact a morphological adaptation, whereby a disyllabic verb is fitted with a prefix da- or at-. This leads to the devel-opment of a neosimplex bóti, -ju. -jau ‘take note of, be careful about, care about’. 357 ReferencesALEW = Altlitauisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. 2015. Unter Leitung von Wolfgang Hock und der Mitarbeit von Elvyra Julija Bukevičiūtė und Chris-tiane Schiller, bearbeitet von Rainer Fecht, Anna Helene Feulner, Eugen Hill und Dagmar S. Wodtko. Bd. I: A-M, Bd. II: N-Ž, Bd. III: Verzeichnisse und Indices. Hamburg: Baar.Boryś, Wiesław. 2005. Słownik etymologiczny języka polskiego. [Etymological Dictionary of Polish]. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie.Brückner, Aleksander. 1927. Słownik etymologiczny języka polskiego. [Etymologi-cal Dictionary of Polish]. Kraków: Krakowska Spółka Wydawnicza.Būga, Kazimieras. 1959. Rinktiniai raštai. [Selected Writings], vol. II. Vilnius: Valstybinė politinės ir mokslinės literatūros leidykla.Fraenkel, Ernst. 1962. Litauisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, Bd. I. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag und Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.LED = Smoczyński, Wojciech. 2018. Lithuanian Etymological Dictionary, vols. 1–5. Edited by Axel Holvoet and Steven Young with the assistance of Wayles Browne. Berlin etc.: Peter Lang.LKŽ = Lietuvių kalbos žodynas. [Dictionary of Lithuanian]. I–XX. Vilnius, 1941–2002.Palionis, Jonas. 2004. XVI–XVII a. lietuviškų raštų atrankinis žodynas (apie 10 000 žodžių). [Dictionary of Selected Lexemes of 16th–17th c. Lithuanian (ca. 10 000 entries)]. Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidybos institutas.Trautmann, Reinhold. 1923. Baltisch-Slavisches Wörterbuch. Göttingen: Vanden-hoeck & Ruprecht.Vaillant, André. 1966. Grammaire comparée des langues slaves. T. III. Paris: Éditions Klincksieck.Vasmer, Max. 1955. Russisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Bd. II. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag.Submitted: 6 January 2021

Old Lithuanian 'plęšti' ‘rejoice, jump in joy, dance’ may be interpreted as a back-formation from *'plenšoti', a verb borrowed from Old Polish 'plęsać'. Keywords: borrowing, back-formation, primary vs secondary verb formation

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Old Lithuanian 'plęšti'

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Old Lithuanian plęšti

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