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Zhrets
A zhrets is a priest in the Slavic religion whose name literally means "one who makes sacrifices". The name appears mainly in the East and South Slavic vocabulary, while in the West Slavs it is attested only in Polish. Most information about the Slavic priesthood comes from Latin texts about the paganism of the Polabian Slavs. The descriptions show that they were engaged in offering sacrifices to the gods, divination and determining the dates of festivals. They possessed cosmological knowledge and were a major source of resistance against Christianity. Etymology The earliest attestation of the word is Old Church Slavonic жьрьць ''žĭrĭcĭ'' "priest". In other Slavic languages it occurs as Russian жрец ''zhrets'', Belarusian жрэц ''zhrets'', and Ukrainian жрець ''zhrets'', all derived from Old East Slavic жрецъ ''žrecŭ'', and Bulgarian and Macedonian жрец ''zhrets'' and Slovene ''žréc'' and all meaning "pagan priest". Czech ''žrec'' was borro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bulgarian Language
Bulgarian (, ; bg, label=none, български, bălgarski, ) is an Eastern South Slavic language spoken in Southeastern Europe, primarily in Bulgaria. It is the language of the Bulgarians. Along with the closely related Macedonian language (collectively forming the East South Slavic languages), it is a member of the Balkan sprachbund and South Slavic dialect continuum of the Indo-European language family. The two languages have several characteristics that set them apart from all other Slavic languages, including the elimination of case declension, the development of a suffixed definite article, and the lack of a verb infinitive. They retain and have further developed the Proto-Slavic verb system (albeit analytically). One such major development is the innovation of evidential verb forms to encode for the source of information: witnessed, inferred, or reported. It is the official language of Bulgaria, and since 2007 has been among the official languages of the Eur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Old Prussian Language
Old Prussian was a Western Baltic language belonging to the Baltic branch of the Indo-European languages, which was once spoken by the Old Prussians, the Baltic peoples of the Prussian region. The language is called Old Prussian to avoid confusion with the German dialects of Low Prussian and High Prussian and with the adjective ''Prussian'' as it relates to the later German state. Old Prussian began to be written down in the Latin alphabet in about the 13th century, and a small amount of literature in the language survives. Classification and relation to other languages Old Prussian is an Indo-European language belonging to the Baltic branch. It is considered to be a Western Baltic language. Old Prussian was closely related to the other extinct Western Baltic languages, namely Sudovian, West Galindian and possibly Skalvian and Old Curonian. Other linguists consider Western Galindian and Skalvian to be Prussian dialects. It is related to the Eastern Baltic languages suc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Latvian Language
Latvian ( ), also known as Lettish, is an Eastern Baltic language belonging to the Baltic branch of the Indo-European language family, spoken in the Baltic region. It is the language of Latvians and the official language of Latvia as well as one of the official languages of the European Union. There are about 1.3 million native Latvian speakers in Latvia and 100,000 abroad. Altogether, 2 million, or 80% of the population of Latvia, speak Latvian. Of those, around 1.16 million or 62% of Latvia's population use it as their primary language at home, however excluding the Latgale Region it is spoken as a native language in villages and towns by over 90% of the population. As a Baltic language, Latvian is most closely related to neighboring Lithuanian (as well as Old Prussian, an extinct Baltic language); however Latvian has followed a more rapid development. In addition, there is some disagreement whether Latgalian and Kursenieki, which are mutually intelligible with Latvian, s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lithuanian Language
Lithuanian ( ) is an Eastern Baltic language belonging to the Baltic branch of the Indo-European language family. It is the official language of Lithuania and one of the official languages of the European Union. There are about 2.8 million native Lithuanian speakers in Lithuania and about 200,000 speakers elsewhere. Lithuanian is closely related to the neighbouring Latvian language. It is written in a Latin script. It is said to be the most conservative of the existing Indo-European languages, retaining features of the Proto-Indo-European language that had disappeared through development from other descendant languages. History Among Indo-European languages, Lithuanian is conservative in some aspects of its grammar and phonology, retaining archaic features otherwise found only in ancient languages such as Sanskrit (particularly its early form, Vedic Sanskrit) or Ancient Greek. For this reason, it is an important source for the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-Euro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cognate
In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words in different languages that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymology, etymological ancestor in a proto-language, common parent language. Because language change can have radical effects on both the sound and the meaning of a word, cognates may not be obvious, and often it takes rigorous study of historical sources and the application of the comparative method to establish whether lexemes are cognate or not. Cognates are distinguished from Loanword, loanwords, where a word has been borrowed from another language. The term ''cognate'' derives from the Latin noun '':wikt:cognatus, cognatus blood relative'. Characteristics Cognates need not have the same meaning, which semantic drift, may have changed as the languages developed independently. For example English language, English ''wikt:starve#English, starve'' and Dutch language, Dutch ''wikt:sterven#Dutch, sterven'' 'to die' or German languag ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proto-Indo-European Language
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists. Far more work has gone into reconstructing PIE than any other proto-language, and it is the best understood of all proto-languages of its age. The majority of linguistic work during the 19th century was devoted to the reconstruction of PIE or its daughter languages, and many of the modern techniques of linguistic reconstruction (such as the comparative method) were developed as a result. PIE is hypothesized to have been spoken as a single language from 4500 BC to 2500 BC during the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, though estimates vary by more than a thousand years. According to the prevailing Kurgan hypothesis, the original homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans may have been in the Pontic–Caspian steppe of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Agent Noun
In linguistics, an agent noun (in Latin, ) is a word that is derived from another word denoting an action, and that identifies an entity that does that action. For example, "driver" is an agent noun formed from the verb "drive". Usually, ''derived'' in the above definition has the strict sense attached to it in morphology, that is the derivation takes as an input a lexeme (an abstract unit of morphological analysis) and produces a new lexeme. However, the classification of morphemes into derivational morphemes (see word formation) and inflectional ones is not generally a straightforward theoretical question, and different authors can make different decisions as to the general theoretical principles of the classification as well as to the actual classification of morphemes presented in a grammar of some language (for example, of the agent noun-forming morpheme). Words related to agent noun An agentive suffix or agentive prefix is commonly used to form an agent noun from a verb. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proto-Slavic Language
Proto-Slavic (abbreviated PSl., PS.; also called Common Slavic or Common Slavonic) is the unattested, reconstructed proto-language of all Slavic languages. It represents Slavic speech approximately from the 2nd millennium B.C. through the 6th century A.D. As with most other proto-languages, no attested writings have been found; scholars have reconstructed the language by applying the comparative method to all the attested Slavic languages and by taking into account other Indo-European languages. Rapid development of Slavic speech occurred during the Proto-Slavic period, coinciding with the massive expansion of the Slavic-speaking area. Dialectal differentiation occurred early on during this period, but overall linguistic unity and mutual intelligibility continued for several centuries, into the 10th century or later. During this period, many sound changes diffused across the entire area, often uniformly. This makes it inconvenient to maintain the traditional definition of a pro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Matchmaking
Matchmaking is the process of matching two or more people together, usually for the purpose of marriage, in which case the matchmaker is also known as a marriage broker. The word is also used in the context of sporting events such as boxing, in business, in Matchmaking (video games), online video games and in pairing organ donors. Practice These services often rely on personality tests (but genetics has even been proposed by Michael Arrington, TechCrunh, on July 22, 2008 ), aiming to maximize the identification of the best match. [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Václav Hanka
Václav Hanka (also written as ''Wenceslaus Hanka'') (10 June 1791 – 12 January 1861) was a Czech philologist. Biography Hanka was born at Hořiněves near Hradec Králové. He was sent in 1807 to school at Hradec Králové, to escape the conscription, then to the University of Prague, where he founded a society for the cultivation of the Czech language. At Vienna, where he afterwards studied law, he established a Czech periodical; and in 1813 he made the acquaintance of Josef Dobrovský, an eminent philologist. On 16 September 1817 Hanka claimed that he had discovered some manuscripts of 13th- and 14th-century Bohemian poems in the church tower of the town of Dvůr Králové nad Labem and later some more at Zelená Hora Castle near Nepomuk. The ''Manuscripts of Dvůr Králové and Zelená Hora'' were made public in 1818, with a German translation by Swoboda. The originals were presented by him to newly founded National Museum at Prague, of which he was appointed libra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mater Verborum
Title page of «Mater Verborum» Mater Verborum (or Glosa Salomonis) is a medieval encyclopedical dictionary written in Latin language around 1240. The document is especially renowned for more than 1000 comments written in it in the medieval Czech language Czech (; Czech ), historically also Bohemian (; ''lingua Bohemica'' in Latin), is a West Slavic language of the Czech–Slovak group, written in Latin script. Spoken by over 10 million people, it serves as the official language of the Czech R .... The manuscript is deposited in the Library of the National Museum (Prague), under signature X A 11. References External links Mater verborum online Medieval literature [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
