Rozważania nad genezą prasłowiańskiego apelatywu *smokъ

The Proto-Slavic term for ‘dragon, big winged snake’, *smokъ, cannot be explained on the basis of the native, purely Slavic vocabulary of Indo-European origin. It was suggested many years ago that the noun in question has been borrowed from a foreign source. The old hypothesis by Słuszkiewicz (1958: 211–214), according to which the Slavs borrowed it from a Germanic source (e.g. OE. snaca m. ‘snake’, E. snake ‘id.’, LG. Schnake m. ‘grass-snake’), specifi cally a Scandinavian one (see Nw. snåk m. ‘snake, viper’, Sw. snok, Dan. snog ‘id.’ < Gmc. *snēkaz m.), should be rejected for morphological and phonological reasons. The author suggests a new etymology, according to which PSl. *smokъ represents an Iranian borrowing (from Iran. *sušnaka- ‘dragon, winged snake’ via Sarmatian). The Indo-Iranian lexical data seem to confi rm this hypothesis, cf. Vedic (RV) śúṣṇa- m. ‘a serpentine demon slain by Indra’ (originally *ćúšna- ‘hisser’ in Indo- Iranian); Shughni sāɣ̌(d) f., Bajui sāw f., Roshani sāw f., Khufi sāw f., Bartangi sāwn f. ‘a big snake (in folklore), dragon’ < Iran. *sušnā- (Morgenstierne 1974: 72–73).