Abstract
The Old Russian verb posibati is known from several contexts, for which the direct translation ‘to beat, hit’ is not appropriate. In juridical texts the meaning ‘to rape (a woman)’ is traditionally accepted, whereas in the context of birchbark writing the translation ‘to bewitch, cast evil spells on (livestock, etc.)’ has recently been proposed. This paper demonstrates that an analysis of posibati as (Lat.) ‘futuere’, i.e. the neutral designation of sexual intercourse, is, in fact, the best translation for the passages mentioned and is supported by the typology of semantic shifts.
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