An Etymological Analysis of the Words ‘Wolf’ and ‘Dog’ Under the Dichotomies “Wild”: “Domestic” and “Distant”: “Near” in the Context of Wolf’s Attacks on Livestock Within Indo-European Languages with Emphasis upon the Croatian Language

Folkloristics 10/1 (2025): 53–73
Author: Luka Velić
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The article depicts the evolution of the Proto-Indo-European words for ‘wolf’ and ‘dog’ in Indo-European daughter-tongues. After a short survey of the existing literature on the evolution and substitutions of the inherited Proto-Indo-European lexicon, a relative stability of the word for ‘wolf,’ i.e., the fact that it is mostly preserved in the daughter-tongues, in comparison to the word for ‘dog,’ which has sometimes been substituted by younger words although it is still preserved in most daughter-tongues, are part of the analysis under the dichotomies “wild”: “domestic” and “distant”: “near.” In these dichotomies, the first two components (“wild” and “distant”) are given to a wolf, i.e., the word ‘wolf,’ while the other two components (“domestic” and “near”) are given to a dog, or the word ‘dog.’ It will be striven to see whether the relative stability of the Proto-Indo-European word ‘wolf’ in the daughter-tongues resembles the fact that the wolf is indeed lexically thus perceived as wild and distant, whilst by sometimes substituting the Proto-Indo-European word ‘dog’ in the daughter-tongues, the dog is seen as domestic and near to man, which should agree with the established dichotomies. In order to carry out such a conclusion, the dichotomy ‘wolf’ : ‘dog’ is compared with similar pairs ‘boar’ : ‘pig’ and ‘aurochs’ : ‘bull’ within the Proto-Indo-European language corpus.

Keywords: etymology, Proto-Indo-European ‘wolf’ and ‘dog’, Proto-Indo-European language, Indo-European daughter-tongues, lexical preservation and substitution, dichotomies “wild”: “domestic” and “distant”: “near.”