Duck-Hunting in Anger?

Abstract

This presentation aims at addressing an apparent minor discrepancy between citations in Shevelov’s A Prehistory of Slavic (1964) and his Historical Phonology of the Ukrainian Language (1979). Shevelov (1964: 403) cites Russian селезень ‘drake’, also occurring in Ukrainian, and gives an Old Irish form selg, glossed as ‘hunt’, as a cognate. In Shevelov 1979: 94, however, Old Irish selg, unglossed, is offered as a cognate for Ukrainian селезінка ‘spleen’ id., and other related Slavic forms, see also Trautmann 1923: 256, Pokorny 1959: 900–901, 987, Vasmer 1964–1973: III: 594–595, while his comment on Russian селезень cites no other cognates. For Old Irish selg itself, which, like селезень and селезінка has two meanings, see Lewis & Pedersen 1961: 18, 33; Thurneysen 1946: 139, Vendryes 1974: S-80–S-81.Superficially, this would provide a very rare example of East Slavic *TolT reflexes developing to *TeleT, and not the regular, and expected *ToloT, but such examples should be treated with caution, cf. Shevelov loc. cit. Indeed, a glance at proposed Indo-European cognates of селезінка/selg ‘spleen’ shows a degree of irregular development that points to a need for closer scrutiny by scholars, cf. Greek σπλήν, Avestan spərəza, etc., raising the question: what has happened to the Slavic *-p-? In contrast to Celtic, Slavic preserves Indo-European *p under most circumstances, and therefore one would expect it to be preserved in any cognate of the Greek and Avestan forms cited above. By simply juxtaposing Old Irish selg here, without further comment, Shevelov loc. cit. introduces a note of confusion for those interested in Slavo-Celtic cognates, and it is the purpose of this paper to disentangle such confusion, and to account for a situation whereby Slavic and Goidelic appear to use the same forms for the concepts of ‘duck’/‘hunting’ and ‘spleen’.