I was rereading one of my favorite Pasternak poems, Зеркало (Mirror) (that webpage has the original Russian alongside an abridged translation by Peter France and Jon Stallworthy), when I stuck on an unusual word I had hurried over before in my attempt to make sense of the whole thing: саднят [sádnyat]. I had scribbled ‘smart, burn’ above it in my copy, which was all I really needed in context, but what kind of verb was it, and where was it from? Before proceeding with those issues, though, I’ll quote the relevant section from Jean Marie Schultz, “Pasternak’s ‘Zerkalo’” (Russian Literature XIII [1983]: 81-100), as a sample of how much work it is to figure out what’s going on in his early poetry:
Here the verb “sadnit'” compacts two distinct sensations, one tactile and one olfactory. First, with its meaning of “to smart” or “to burn”, “sadnit'” indicates the feeling that an abrasion might produce; thus, the verb conveys the sensation the trees (if personified) might be expected to have as their sap flows out over the broken limbs. Second, that the trees burn the air with their sap relates possibly to the very pungent odor that pine resin from newly broken limbs has as it fills the air, particularly after a rain (VIII:iii) when all smells are intensified.⁴
fn 4: Sap is a tree’s natural antiseptic, and the burning sensation produced by the application of an antiseptic to a wound is well known. However, it must be remembered that this is a humanly perceived feeling so that we have here, as throughout the poem, the human experience imposed upon a seemingly impersonal description. Furthermore, the allusion to the “medicinal” function of sap prefigures the medicine, “lekarstvo”, introduced in the next stanza. Likewise, the underlying evocation of the sap’s odor here also works toward the development of a sub-motif revolving around scent (V:iii).
OK, so what’s the story with the verb? Well, Wiktionary provides help with its usage;
it occurs in collocations like но́гу са́днит [nógu sádnit] ‘my leg is sore’ and на се́рдце са́днит [na sérdce sádnit] ‘my heart hurts.’ But what’s really interesting is the etymology, given in Russian Wiktionary: it’s derived from Old Russian садьно ‘wound,’ which in turn goes back to Proto-Slavic *saditi, from Proto-Indo-European *sodéyeti, causative of *sed- ‘to sit.’ The English verb sit is from that root, but cast your eyes down that page and see how much else is! The thematic root present *séd-e-ti gives Proto-Celtic *sedeti, which with a couple of prefixes gives us Welsh eistedd and hence eisteddfod; the -ye- present *sédyeti gives Greek ἕζομαι (as well as sit); *séd-os ~ *séd-es gives Welsh hedd ‘peace’; *sod-ó- gives Proto-Slavic *xodъ and Greek ὁδός; *sōd-o- gives Proto-Germanic *sōtą ‘soot’ (“reflecting the nature of soot as accumulated particles that sit on surfaces”); *sōd-u-s gives Proto-Slavic *sadъ ‘grove; garden’ (hence Russian сад, which also features in the poem); *sod-yo-m ‘seat’ gives Old Irish suide and Latin solium; *sed-lo- ‘seat’ gives Proto-Germanic *setlaz; *ni-sd-ós ‘nest’ (with zero grade) gives Proto-Balto-Slavic *nísda (leading to Russian гнездо) and Proto-Germanic *nestą (leading to nest)… well, I could spend all day lost in the web of connections. In Russian alone, the root is the ultimate source of посадить/сажать ‘to seat, plant,’ сиделка ‘(sick-)nurse,’ седло ‘saddle,’ село ‘village,’ сажа ‘soot,’ досадный ‘annoying,’ наседка ‘brood-hen,’ население ‘population,’ осадки ‘precipitation,’ осада ‘siege,’ председатель ‘chairman, president,’ расселина ‘crevice, fissure,’ сосед ‘neighbor,’ ссадина ‘scratch,’ усадьба ‘farmstead, country estate,’ and всадник ‘rider, horseman’ (as well as many others). This is the kind of thing that made me want to be a historical linguist.
Alas, I don’t see my favorite, Irish sídh ‘fairy mound’ (as in banshee) listed or linked to among the derivatives!
(I was curious about the genesis of this etymology. See p. 245 of Patrick Sims-Williams ‘The evidence for vernacular Irish literary influence on early mediaeval Welsh literature’, in Dorothy Whitelock et al., eds (2011) Ireland in Early Medieval Europe : Studies in Memory of Kathleen Hughes, visible to LH readers on Google Books here, I hope. It seems this root etymology for Old Irish síd was first proposed by John Morris-Jones in Taliesin (1918), volume 28 of Y Cymmrodor, on p. 238, n. 1, available here.)
Hmph. Can’t say I’m sold on Welsh hedd “peace” being related to sídh “fairy mound.” And Morris-Jones had some weird notions about etymologies sometimes.*
However, the GPC entry for hedd actually cites an Old Irish síd, síth “peace”, so I suppose it works formally, at least, even if the semantics seem pretty dubious. “The strange combination of meanings ‘tumulus’ and ‘peace’ must have its roots in Celtic mythology”, eh? Not buying that without some evidence of an actual myth. You could explain away pretty much any kind of semantic mismatch with that kind of handwaving.
But GPC does go on to say of Old Irish síd, síth “peace” that it might be the same word as síd, síth “gorsedd y Tylwyth Teg.”
* This Siδi can hardly be the “Welsh equivalent” of Irish síd, as M-J blithely asserts, if by that he means “cognate”: that just doesn’t work. A loanword from Irish seems not impossible, though. There are quite a few of those in Welsh.
I like the idea that Welsh heddlu “police” might etymologically be “fairy host”, though.
I don’t understand how Old Irish síd (in either sense) can come from the PIE *sed- root. Welsh hedd is straightforward: it goes back to *sedos without any trouble, and “sit” to “peace” is semantically doable, via “stasis” or the like. But how do you get the Old Irish /i:/?
I suppose Latin sedes shows the same ablaut, though.
I see that the long vowel in the first syllable of sedes is itself somewhat mysterious:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sedes#Latin
But how do you get the Old Irish /i:/?
From the “long e grade” of the root, according to Morris-Jones; click on Xerîb’s last link.
Here’s a question, just in case someone more knowledgeable in Old Russian will turn up. Where саднить got it’s suffix -н- ? Tsyganenko thinks that there was a noun садьно (wound) which later got verbalized, but was itself a nominalization of садить like болеть->больно. But that doesn’t make sense. It would mean that a wound just sits there. There might be a generalization from a specific wound which comes from sitting on a horse. Thus the meaning would be “a wound acquired from sitting”. Presumably there is a Ukrainian word садно with this meaning. But there is also a word ссадина (abrasion) with apparent etymology с-садина (something that was sitting is removed) is it a parallel development?
These roots are not only produce a large garden, but are also very tangled….
@D.O.: sadit’ is from the PIE causative *so(:)d-eye- “to set”, not from the intransitive “sit”. So the idea would rather be that a wound is something that is put by someone else on the body. For a similar idea, compare colloquial German jemandem eine setzen “to slap someone”, literally “to set one on someone”.
@DE: the common idea behind the fairy hill and the peace meanings could be that of “settlement”.
Hans, makes sense (though a little bit strange), thank you!