The idiom sobaku s "est' 'know something thoroughly': a semantic-motivational reconstruction

The article is devoted to the idiom sobaku s"est' na chem-libo [literary: eat a dog at smth.], 'to know smth. thoroughly', that characterizes a person who has acquired experience, knowledge and skills in any field. The topicality of the study is justified by the invariable interest of native speakers in the origin of idioms due to the eccentricity of the image of eating a dog. The existing versions of the origin of this idiom are given, their strengths and weaknesses are rammented on. The author draws the data of Russian dialects to justify the two most probable hypotheses of the origin of the idiom. A comparison with the dialect expressions besa s"est' [eat a demon], gvozd' s"est' [eat a nail], s"est' igolki [eat nedles] with the same meaning 'be good at smth., have experience in smth.'. The author believes that the idioms s"est' sobaku, sozhrat' sobaku, besa s"est' have structural and semantic similarities in the motivational attitude with expressions krokodila s"est' [eat a crocodile], skorpiona s"est' [eat a scorpion], etc. The hypothesis that these idioms are based on the sacral-mythological motif of a consumer being like food. It is shown that experience in the naive-linguistic consciousness is associated with eating something. In particular, in the analyzed lexical-semantic field there are metaphors such as "trying many different things" (a person who experienced a lot, is skilled) and "eating during a long life" (a person who lived long, is skilled). In addition, in the figurative system of the vocabulary of experience there is a mythological model of eating. It is no coincidence that a living creature or an infernal character acts as "absorbed food". The characteristics of this entity are transferred to the person who is the subject of the action indicated by the verb съесть 'to eat'. The question of the image of dog interpretation can be solved within this mythological version (It is known that in the mythological beliefs of primordial Slavs the dog is endowed with magical properties: the gift of foresight, the ability to predict death, drive away impure force; the dog has supernatural knowledge, maybe a werewolf and also an object of healing magic), or in the context of common ideas about the animal (a dog can be trained, it is trained until the formation of the skills to guard, hunt, sled and others; therefore, its image can serve as a symbol of competence, that is, experience of repeated action or activity). The sacral-mythological version is appealing because the semantic frame of demonism links both components of the idiom sobaku s"est': the image of mystical eating for miraculous assimilation and the image of a dog that in the popular mind has connection with the other world. The explanation for the emergence of the seme 'experienced/skilled' on the basis of the household characteristics of a dog looks more reliable from the point of view of semantic accuracy. Multiple repetition of actions and the development of skills just constitute the essence of the accumulation of experience, and eating a creature that possesses such real properties symbolizes the acquisition of such properties.

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