With All Due Respect, on Slavic Abstracts in -y: The History of Proto-Slavic cěty ‘respect’ and Some Comparative Notes on its Congeners (ljuby ‘love’, cěly ‘healing, greeting’)*

Abstract:

The scarcely attested Proto-Slavic *cěty *-ъve ‘respect’ appears to be a mostly overlooked member of the small class of abstracts in *-y *-ъve; no precise accounts of the noun’s origin have been proposed so far. Two complementary approaches are put forth in the article: 1) inheritance from a PIE animate s-stem *keyt-ōs >> *koyt-ōs (paralleling a recent analysis of *ljuby ‘love’ < PIE *lewbh-ōs as well as its presumed secondary association with a verb in *-i-ti) or 2) inner-Slavic origin based on the formally similar *ljuby ‘love’ and *cěly ‘healing (subst.)’. The study also offers novel analyses—based on hitherto unexploited philological and lexicographical data—concerning various related issues (e.g., the status of PSl nominal *cětъ, verbal *cětiti, and personal names in *Cěto/i-; the adposition *cětja; the semantic and pragmatic developments in *cěly ‘greeting, kiss’; the secondary rise of masculine *cělovъ/*cělyvъ ‘kiss’) with the purpose of integrating the entirety of the material concerning the root *cět- and the abstract type in *-y *-ъve into coherent pictures.