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Comment by josefrichter | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting, because "svidanyie" in Russian is probably closely related to "svitani" in Czech, which means "sunrise", nothing else. But more literally "svitani" would probably translate as "meet again". Fascinating how meanings morph and sometimes the original meaning is fairly obfuscated.

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Funny, as a Ukrainian I never connected it this way, precisely for the same reason. In Ukrainian, “svitanok” means sunrise, with the root “svit” (world, but also light). In Russian, “svidanie” should have the root “vid” (view, sighting). So, to me, those are words with totally different roots :) https://ru.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/свидание points to https://ru.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/vidět in the etymology, among other things. But your interpretation would have been quite cool, though I don’t meet people often at the sunrise!

you see, "svit" exists in Czech too. It's used mostly as "svit slunce" meaning the light of sun. But then in broader sense "svitit" is a verb meanning "to light" - so it's fairly obvious that "to shine a light" or "a surise" or to "greet someone" are all related to "meet againt" or "see again". It's all variations of the same basically. At least it seems so, I am no linguist.

Linguistic sources say that svet/svit/light/sunrise/world and videt/see/meet have completely different proto-indo-european roots - kweyt and weyd respectively.

So nice theory, but no. “Svid” is not a root here, it’s “s”+”vid”.

interesting, didn't know that! can you point me to those resources to learn more, please? fascinating topic for me.

it's not. it's from "videt'", to see

yeah but it's still probably related. "videt" and "vitat" (to welcome) is probably the same etymological base. and "svitat" is kinda like see again, or welcome again. But yeah, this is diggging kidna deeper in the meaning that you normally don't think of in regular use of our languages.

Because we get to see the Sun again each morning...? (WAG)

svidanie stems from vid, which is a root of "to see".

s-vid... - means completed action, as in "to spot".

...vid-anie - a noun version of the same.

s-vid-anie - an event of managing to see someone/something.

do ... - until ...

Pretty logical, actually.

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