The semantics and etymology of Proto-Slavic lexemes of sacredness and their continuation in Polish folk rituals

Abstract

The article deals with some aspects of the problem of the participation of Iranian peoples in the process of formation of the Proto-Slavic cultural and linguistic community, which has been discussed for many years. By taking as a basis the methodology of semiotic study of language and culture in its diachronic aspects, an attempt was made to reconstruct the cultur[1]al contexts in which Proto-Slavic tradition incorporated, in the form of the words *bogъ and *svętъ – elements of Scythian mythology. By juxtaposing historical, linguistic, and ethnographic materials, a corpus of several motifs (“mythologemes”) was reconstructed, which could have accompanied the processes of the so-called “Iranian inversion”, which are very well known for Slavic philology, but less for anthropological and mythological reconstructions.