THE SEA IN POETIC LANGUAGE OF THE ANCIENT GERMANS (TESTIMONY OF THE TEXTS)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the consideration of language means, used for expressing of the sea element image in ancient Germanic texts. For a number of words naming the sea, secondary nature of «marine» semantics is established relative to a whole series of primary meanings ʻwaveʼ, ʻsurfʼ, ʻwater billowʼ, ʻmovement (of water mass)ʼ etc. The contexts collected in the study illustrate the semantic differences in word usage, enabling one to more or less exactly state when it is about a wave, the movement of a water surface, and when it is actually about the sea. It is further suggested a description of the structure and semantics of the sum of composites, often used to denote the marine world. It follows from the description that the «marine» vocabulary of ancient Germanic poetic texts was an open system (it could be replenished with new composites), which developed by analogy with itself, having as samples the composites inherited from the Proto-Germanic language. Special attention is paid to the set of epithets of the sea in the accessible corpus of German texts and descriptive expressions, in which the sea is likened to a person, and this fact indicates the ancient metaphorical perception of the world from the standpoint of anthropocentrism