Reconstruction talk:Proto-Slavic/dobrъ
Latest comment: 3 years ago by Florian Blaschke
I'm wondering: "*dobrъ *dьnь" and "*dobrъ *večerъ" came from Proto-Slavic? If yes we could put them in derived terms. —Useigor (talk) 18:40, 26 September 2014 (UTC)
- They almost certainly did exist. But they're basically just SoP terms, so we shouldn't include them. —CodeCat 19:05, 26 September 2014 (UTC)
- They are used as greetings and thus not sums of parts. They do not mean "a good day" when used as standalone phrases. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 23:48, 14 October 2014 (UTC)
- I agree they are not some of parts but do we really need reconstructions for multipart words, like "*dobrъ dьnь" or "*dobrъ večerъ"? Just curious. Certainly all Slavs used something like this. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 01:04, 15 October 2014 (UTC)
- Yes because even phrases can be reconstructed for protolanguages, though it's much more complicated than for ordinary reconstructions and has only been done lately with the advent of computers which greatly facilitate such job. These two are ordinary phrases, but there is special field of comparative studies dedicated solely for the so-called poetic formulas or verbal formulas. For example, the phrase for "imperishable fame" appears both in Homer and Vedas, so we can reconstruct PIE *ḱlewos ndʰgʷʰitom. For Proto-Slavic it's pretty easy due to the abundance of attestation, and you can find many phrasal reconstructions in Sławski's Słownik prasłowiański (it lists *dobrъ dьnь under the headword for *dobrъ).--Ivan Štambuk (talk) 17:00, 15 October 2014 (UTC)
- I agree they are not some of parts but do we really need reconstructions for multipart words, like "*dobrъ dьnь" or "*dobrъ večerъ"? Just curious. Certainly all Slavs used something like this. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 01:04, 15 October 2014 (UTC)
- They are used as greetings and thus not sums of parts. They do not mean "a good day" when used as standalone phrases. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 23:48, 14 October 2014 (UTC)
- How old are these phrases really, though? I have a suspicion that they might actually not have been in wide, let alone regular, use in medieval Europe, definitely not in late antiquity, and perhaps originated in Romance, specifically in Old French, and then spread over Europe, possibly as late as in the Middle French period, with French culture. (The origin might also be in Medieval Greek instead.) I mean, there's no set phrase bonum diem (or vesperum or vesperem) or bonus dies (or vesper) in Classical Latin, several widespread languages still don't have a literal translation of this phrase, and good day is not the universal greeting even in English, nor is good evening particularly common. (Oddly, I can't find anything on the Internet on this point, but it might just be a lack of google-fu.) In any case, I'm sceptical that they could go back as far as c. 600 AD in Proto-Slavic. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 19:14, 24 October 2021 (UTC)