Historia polskiego podstawowego słownictwa astronomicznego na tle słowiańskim
The history of Polish basic astronomical vocabulary on the Slavic background

Summary/Abstract: The article presents the history of Polish basic astronomical vocabulary on the Slavic background. There are twelve selected notions described: sky, sun, moon, new moon, full moon, quarter moon, star, planet, eclipse, horizon, comet and meteor. The majority of Polish contemporary basic astronomical vocabulary is already attested to in Old Polish (like niebo, słońce, księżyc, nów, gwiazda, planeta, zaćmienie). The words pełnia, kwadra, horyzont and kometa appeared firstly in the 16th cent. The lexeme meteor in the current astronomical meaning is attested to in the 19th cent. We deal with the numerous synonyms of contemporary astronomical terms in the history of Polish language. Some of them, like firmament, sklepienie niebieskie and widnokrąg, are still used, others disappeared irretrievably, for example obezrok, ziemiokres and poziom (all mean ‘horizon’), some are preserved only in dialects, like miotła ‘comet’ and miesiąc ‘moon’. It is worth noticing, that some of them – attested to already in Old Polish are for the first time named astronomical notions, for example miotła and obezrok. It is known that the group of early attested native words stand out distinctly in the Slavic languages because the names of respective notions in this group correspond with each other very closely (sky, sun, star, eclipse). The contemporary Polish name of moon (księżyc) is an old neosemantism. On the contrary, the names of moon in other Slavic languages are inherited words (however, they are derived from two different bases). The names of planet, comet, horizon and meteor are mainly loanwords (internationalisms) in the Slavic languages today.

• Details
• Contents