Linguocultural transfer: perception of the world in the ancient traditions

The article deals with the problem of linguocultural transference
in ancient traditions. Even though in ancient cultures a word to word borrowing
of cultural images of the world did not take a place, but cultural transference
of knowledge certainly happened by. The structures of knowledge, which stood
behind the dictionary, moved from one tradition into another. They formed analogue
structures in the form of frames of perception of the world which were
similar for many cultures. Our hypothesis is that these transferences take place
in the conceptualized domains in which merger of things and concepts occur.
The concept of the world that was current in the Indo-European tradition several
millennia ago is the subject of reconstruction. As reported in some works the
world concept for Indo-Europeans was thought as a constituent part of mythological
topic of the world tree, Indo-European *medhio, that divides the space
and creatures into three parts. The authors of “Semantic dictionary of Indo-
European language” T. V. Gamkrelidze and Vyach. Vs. Ivanov built up a tree
of semantic features of nonwild animated beings. The wild animals, in their turn,
are subdivided into three groups, namely, creatures of the upper world [*hue(i)
bird, eagle, crane], animals of the middle world [*medhio – wolf, bear, leopard etc.] and animals of the lower world [*bhudhn – snake, worm, otter]. The stem
*medhio is found in Old Indian Madhya and Old Islandic Mithgarthr “Middle
world”. Sometimes features of a reconstruction are compatible with peculiarities
of another, when they are considered altogether. Thus Old Germanic *midjagardaz
was considered as a partitive phrase, that denotes an absolute center
of the tradition, that is symbolically embodied in a tree, mountain, pillar, pit.
The data give direct evidence of acceptability of such reconstruction in Germanic
studies. So the basic semiotic categories as well as a micromotive of the
world tree and taxonomies of culture are compatible with etymologies, lexicogrammatical
phenomena of the languages. However such compatibility is evident
only in some cultural areas, particularly, in Baltic and Old Germanic regions.
One of the criteria of establishing conceptual structures is a new approach
to the analysis that is a combination of the etymological analysis, on the one
hand, and the analysis of excerpts from the texts, on the other hand. Linguocultural
transference tree – middle-cross is typical of a number of ancient traditions
including Old Germanic.