La terminologia lituana del ‘nutrire’
The Lithuanian Terminology for 'nutrire'

Summary/Abstract: In this article vve start out by examining Lith. šermenys ‘funeral banquet’, derived in all likelihood from sérti ‘to nourish animals (especially domestic ones)’ and analyse — from both a diachronic and a synchronic point of view - the main terms that mean ‘to nourish’ or ‘nourishment’ in the Lithuanian area (namely the verbal forms šerti, penėti, maitinti, and the corresponding nominal forms pašaras, penas, maistas). Šerti, attested in the first centuries only in lexica, and probably used in relation to human beings before our written sources, as the presence of its derivate šermenys suggests, antedates the Baltic age and is in all likelihood the most ancient Lithuanian term meaning ‘to nourish’; penėti, very well attested both in the texts and lexica of the first centuries in relation both to human beings and to animals (also in the sense of ‘to feed for fattening’), dates back to the Baltic age; maitinti, attested in ancient times only in lexica, like šerti, in relation to both humans and animals, is nowadays the most widely used and most generic verb meaning ‘to nourish (humans and animals)’ and probably does not antedate the Lithuanian age. As far as nominal forms are concerned, pašaras, attested in the first centuries both in texts and in lexica exclusively in relation to animals, probably dates back to the Baltic age; pènas and maistas, both attested in the first centuries, the former in texts and lexica, the other only in lexica, in relation both to human beings and to animals, do not seem to be more ancient than the Lithuanian age. As for the other verbal and nominal forms that currently fall within this semantic area, they turn out to be, for the most part, either devoid of comparable forms, hence no more ancient than the Lithuanian age, or if they do have comparable forms, they are perhaps the result of polygenesis. The situation of this terminology in the other Baltic areas is, on the whole, doubtless more recent than the Lithuanian one.

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