W sprawie dyskusji nad najstarszymi zapożyczeniami węgierskimi w polszczyźnie: stpol. bantować ‘karać’ i pol. dial. bantować ‘dokuczać’ –
A contribution to the discussion on the oldest Hungarian loan words in Polish: OPol. bantować ‘to punish’ and Pol. dial. bantować ‘to torment’

Summary/Abstract: The paper investigates the history of two words which many authors have regarded as polysemes: OPol. bantować ‘to punish (with exile)’ (attested four times in decrees of punishment, from 1475 to 1500, and there is one attestation from 1519 the meaning of which remains, however, uncertain) and MPol. ~ Pol. dial. bantować which, generally speaking, means ‘to torment’ (attested since 1614). Interpreted as polysemes, they were both explained as a single loan word from Hung. bánt ‘to torment’. However, the semantics of the Hungarian word speaks against this interpretation: Hung. bánt was never used as a legal term meaning ‘to punish with exile’, and neither were its reflexes in Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian, Romanian and Croatian. It seems possible that the Old Polish word is a loan word from MHG bannen ‘to punish with exile, to banish’ even though the issue of -t- and the lack of the expected g- in the Polish form remains, for the time being, open. The medial -t- may be a trace of the final -t in the MHG past participle gebannt, as was suggested by de Vincenz/Hentschel (2010), or a result of a blend with OPol. ochtowan ‘exiled, banished’. The latter was only attested once in 1500 in the exactly same sentence that also contains OPol. bantowan ‘punished with exile’ (see SStp. I 60). It does not seem groundless, then, to claim that OPol. bantować ‘to punish (with exile)’ and MPol. bantować ‘to torment, etc.’ (the latter being still in use in the contemporary dialects of southern Lesser Poland) are neither polysemes as they have different roots, nor homonyms as they have never been used at the same time and place.

• Details
• Contents