Genetic and area affinity of the Latin verb audīre

Human beings learn the world in the first place with the help of different senses: hearing, sight, taste, smell and touch. The sense perceptionthen is followed by the process of comprehension with the help of mind. The perceptive cognition of the environment could be preconsciousand independent from the person as well as conscious and intentional, whereas the rational cognition could be only conscious.All these cognitive processes are anyway reflected in the language, since learning the reality a man always names cognised objects. Thearticle below covers the analysis of the verb audīre, which is the basic sign for auditory perception in the Latin language. The lexemeaudīre is a polysemantic word with 8 alternants. Interestingly, only first two basic meanings (to hear, to listen to) are directly connectedwith perceptive semantics. The other alternants have, either explicitly or implicitly, the meaning to hear, to listen to as thesemantic centre, but their denotations are already related to the process of comprehension, to the result of the heard or the understood.Therefore, we can easily see the changes in the subject-object relations in the semantics development. The verb audīre is derivativelyactive. Its derivatives could be semantically divided into several groups: 1) the lexemes indicating the process of auditory perception(audientia, audītio, audītus), 2) the lexemes naming the actor, i.e. the listener (audiens, audītor), 3) the lexemes meaning the result ofauditory perception or its object (audītio, audītiuncula, audītus), 4) the lexemes naming the very hearing sense (audītio, audītus), 5) derivativeverbs (audītāre, oboedīre). Speaking about the genetic affinities of the verb audīre we can mention that originating from theIndo-European root *au- it has a plenty of kin lexemes in other Indo-European languages. These kin words are formally connected withthe root but have different expanders such as *-is-, *-m-, *-si-. The semantic content of the kin words is rather wide: from the general tothe concrete auditory and visual perceptions on the one hand, and from the naming of human mind to the designation of thinking processon the other hand. There are also some lexemes (ancient Indian, ancient Greek, Baltic), which can combine perceptive and rationalmeanings in their semantics. Various semantics and the problems of meanings partitioning in some languages (e.g. in the ancient Greek),when the semantics of one word contains both auditory and visual perceptions of the environment, could mean a long and difficult wayof semantics formation, which appears by lexemes naming concrete perceptions. The existing lexical material proves that the primarysemantics of the Indo-European root *au- to perceive, to sense, to comprehend finds reflection in the descendant languages.

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