On the Etymology and Semantic History of Slavic *kras-

Abstract

The history of how humans discovered percussion methods of fi re-lighting presupposes the primacy of the meaning ‘cut, hew' for Proto-Slavic *kresati, the ‘fi re striking' semantics of the verb being a more recent development. The article argues for the hypothesis that the noun *krasa, denoting a craf-ted piece perfect in shape = a beautiful object (cf. the motivational pattern of Latin formosus ‘shapely, beautiful'), could be a derivative of *kresati. The ‘fi re making' semantics developed by *kresati would in its turn moti-vate the shift towards the meaning ‘red (color)', by association with fire.