Polski leksem dziecko i angielski leksem felicity jako wyrazy pokrewne: studium etymologiczno-historyczne

According to etymological sources, Polish dziecko ‘a child’ and English felicity ‘joy, happiness’ are cognates, as they derive from the same Proto-Indo-European root *dhe(i) ‘to suck’. Despite the fact that these two have chosen two different paths in their semantic evolution in different cultures (dziecko in Slavic one, and felicity first in Romance culture, later in Germanic one), it seems that they were both mentally associated with babyhood and maternity at a certain moment in the past. The objectives of the paper are the following. First, I want to present the Slavic etymology of the lexeme dziecko, as well the Romance and Germanic etymology of felicity. Second, I aim to chase and discuss their semantic evolution from Proto-Indo European root *dhe(i) ‘to suck’ to their contemporary meanings. Third, I choose to find and explain the extralinguistic (cultural) factors which motivated the above mentioned semantic changes. In order to explicate the motivation behind culturally conditioned semantic alteration, a reference is made to the theory of linguistic worldview, as understood by Jerzy Bartmiński (2002, 2006), as well as to panchrony, as viewed by Przemysław Łozowski (2010, 2018).