Abstract
The article is devoted to the anniversary of Professor Viktor Krupa – the known Slovak ethnographer and linguist. The object of the analysis was the name of one of the most popular books of Hero of the day – Za siedmimi morami („Over the seven seas“), which seems to be characteristic for the author’s biography. This excpression is included in the Slavic proverbs and sayings with the concept of „sea“. In this case, although the idiom za siedmimi morami is not fixed by any phrasebook or by the majority of monolingual and bilingual dictionaries of the Slovak language, it is widely known in colloquial speech and is often used in modern Slovak literature and the media. In the cited contexts, the expression retains its folk stylistic flavor, which often emphasizes the typical folk-poetic speech „increments“ to its meaning and rhythm, reinforcing the semantics of „remoteness“: za siedmimi ostrovmi a za siedmimi morami, za siedmimi horami a siedmimi morami etc. This variation suggested by the presence of Slovak folklore explicate version of our expression, where the numerical component of the „seven“ is replaced by „nine“ – za deviatimi horami, za siedmimi morami.
Expression za siedmimi morami is one of the many „sea“ – sayings and proverbs recorded in the Slovak language. Each of them has its own distribution area, and its own history, sometimes going back to the ancient European cultural heritage. And in all of them reflect the semantics of infinite space, symbolized by component more („sea“), which created also the idiom za siedmimi morami.
Linguistic analysis of the expression on the background of its Slavic correspondences shows that it has deep folkloric and mythological roots in the Slavic and Indo-European world. This ancient symbolism was explicated in the title of one of the many books of Professor Victor Krupa.