Vārdi zīme, zīmēt, zīmot senajos latviešu rakstu avotos

Abstract

In the article, the words zīme, zīmēt and zīmot, as well as other formatives with these words, which are included as entries in the Historical Dictionary of Latvian (LVVV, https://tezaurs.lv/lvvv/), are discussed. Attention is turned to the aspects of how these entries are made and what problems the authors of the Dictionary meet. LVVV is based on the corpus of early written Latvian SENIE (http://senie.korpuss.lv/toc.jsp), as well as material from two lexicographic sources of the 17th century. One of the most difficult tasks for the authors of the Historical Dictionary is the explanation of the semantics of the entry word – most often, the words in the early texts are used with several meanings. For example, the authors of the Dictionary have distinguished three of them for the word zīme: 1) visible sign (object) marking, indicating or giving evidence of something; 2) sign (phenomenon, feature) announcing, acknowledging something; 3) picture, image. The word zīme and its derivatives are semantically varied and very widely used in the Latvian texts of the 16th and 17th centuries. The use of prefixed verbs derived from the verbs zīmot and zīmēt is particularly extensive, for example, apzīmot, iezīmot, iezīmēt, nozīmēt, expressing different shades of meaning. The meaning of these words is mainly connected to the noun zīme, which is at the base of the verbs, not with the verb zīmēt ‘to draw’. It is believed that initially, zīme was ‘recognition sign, feature’, but the verbs zīmēt, zīmot have characteristic meanings ‘mark out, denote’, ‘to give a sign’, etc. Perhaps the contemporary meaning of the verb zīmēt is related to the third meaning of the word zīme, namely ‘picture, image’. In the early texts, this meaning of the verb appears in the use of the prefixed verb nozīmēt.