My calendar has a single running daily task in Ukrainian and it is “розташувати ельфа. Who can guess why I put it down in Ukrainian?
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Opinions, art, debate
Opinions, art, debate
My calendar has a single running daily task in Ukrainian and it is “розташувати ельфа. Who can guess why I put it down in Ukrainian?
Clarissa's Blog 
“Who can guess why I put it down in Ukrainian?”
I can but I won’t spoil it for the cyrillic impaired.
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Klara doesn’t read Ukrainian?
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No, she’s aggressively anti-languages. 🙂
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“розташувати”
That puzzled me, the closest cognate(?) I could find in Polish would mean ‘reshuffle’…. which I guess makes some sense though the ш has turned into c (s) in Polish….. Semantic shifts of roots/words from one Slavic language to the next are always fun.
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It means “to place”. You are supposed to place the elf in curious, unexpected locations around the house.
It sounds like the Polish word you mean is closest to the Russian “тасовать” which does mean shuffle (a deck of cards, for example). From that, in the years of my youth, Russian acquired the neologisms “тусоваться” (hang out or shuffle around with friends) and the now ubiquitous “тусовка” (group of people you hang out with).
As for the Ukrainian розташувати, I suspect it might come from the German Taschen, because it’s the closest on meaning to “to place”. But that’s just my suspicion. I don’t know for sure.
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” the Polish word you mean ”
I looked up roztaszować which is given as an older variant of modern roztasować which actually means more something like ‘disperse’ (the roz- makes more sense then. Changing sz to s was once a feature of the Mazovian dialect so maybe the sound change happened there).
Another sources gives tasz- and tas- as separate roots, tasz- from German Taschen and tas- from French tasser…..
Weird.
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