| Summary: | Slavic names of ‘the back’ and ‘the shoulders’ in the light of dialectal materials and historic sources
The meaning of the names of ‘the back’ and ‘the shoulders’ are very ambiguous, which is also characteristic of the other names of the parts of the body. Certain names of ‘the back’ often refer to only their upper or lower part, as well as to ‘the spinal column’, while certain names of ‘the shoulders’ also mean ‘the shoulder’, ‘the upper part of the arm, however, below the elbow’ or ‘the whole arm to the palm’. In the plural form, this causes the confusion between ‘the back’ and ‘the shoulders’.
‘The back’ and ‘the shoulder’ have only one group of common indigenous names: *pletji, *pletj-E and several word-forming derivates. In the both meanings, one form – *pletji – occurred, which was characterized by an obvious territorial difference. In addition, in the names of ‘the back’, the names: spina and formations *χrьbьtъ, *χribьtъ, connected with the root *gъrb-, *lędvьje and *zada cover wide territories. The remaining ones are extremely rare.
In the names of ‘the shoulders’, however, apart from the lexemes connected with the root *pletj-, names derived from the root *orm-, exhibiting a great morphological differentiation, occur. Lack of information in OLA records about grammatical forms somewhat complicates their interpretation. The clarification of complicated morphological transformations of these forms is made easier only by materials derived from beyond OLA. Historical materials prove that in eastern Slavic languages originally the names derived from the root *orm- were unknown.
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