South Slavic lexicon in Balkanic context

The word family of the noun xala

Марта, Бјелетић

Balcanica

34

143

155

0350-7653

10.2298/BALC0334143B

http://dais.sanu.ac.rs/handle/123456789/4166

2003-2019/08/12/16:17:12

The paper offers a semantic analysis of the word family of the South Slavic *xala. attested in Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian and Bulgarian, this noun originally used to denote both the storm, tempest and the daemon causing it. According to popular beliefs the principal attributives of *xala are enormous size, strength and obesity, so the noun has secondarily developed such meanings as "a huge creature", "a man or animal of enormous physical strength", "an obese, greedy man". The semantic complex of the noun proper has yielded various meanings of nominal derivatives, such as "windy" "angry", "to rage", "to eat", etc. Certain meanings within this word family have been developed under the influence of etymologically diverse, but formally and semantically close lexemes, Slavic (e.g. *xalг "dirt(y)" *xaliti "to hit; pet") as well as non-Slavic (e.g. Gk. cal(n)w "destroy demolish").