Grecki apelatyw κόρθῡς ‘garście zżętego zboża, pokosy’ i jego relacja do polskiego dialektyzmu króda ‘sterta snopów na polu’
The Greek appellative κόρθῡς ‘handfuls of harvested grain, swaths’ and its relation to the Polish dialectal word króda ‘a pile of sheaves in the field’

Summary/Abstract: The article discusses two collective nouns (nomina collectiva) from the domain of agricultural terminology (Greek Doric κόρθῡς f. coll. ‘handfuls of harvested grain, swaths’; Polish dial. króda ‘a pile of sheaves in the field’) whose common Indo-European origin is indicated. The probable derivational basis of the Greek collective noun was the Doric appellative *κορθός m. ‘something truncated’, preserved in the Laconian dialect of Ancient Greek, cf. the Hesychian gloss κορσόν∙κορμόν (“korsón: log”). The Polish dialectal word króda derives from the Proto-Slavic archetype *korda (f. coll.), for which the following meanings can be reconstructed: ‘a pile of sheaves in the field’, secondarily ‘any pile (especially a pile of branches)’ and ‘a pile of firewood’. Hence, via singularization, the following secondary meanings arose: ‘firebrand, fire, hearth’ and ‘altar’. It is shown that the Greek-Slavic collective nouns are cognate formations from the point of view of Indo-European word-formation and etymology. They should be analyzed as belonging to the Proto-Indo-European verbal root *ker- ‘to cut (off), shave’, cf. Greek κείρω ‘to cut (off), shave (of hair); to mow off, cut down, ravage’, Armenian k‘erem ‘to scratch, shave’, Lithuanian kertù, kirsti ‘to chop, cut, mow, reap with a scythe’, Proto-Slavic *čerti ‘to incise, separate, split bark from trees’, also *čersti (< *kert-ti) ‘to cut, incise, cut out‘. Thus, the collective nouns under scrutiny go back to two related historical forms: PIE. *kor-dh-uh2- : *kor-dh-eh2- (f. coll.).

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