Abstrakt: | The subject of the article is sixteenth century idiomatic expressions with the
names of birds functioning in contemporary Polish. Eleven units of that time were
noted down, which in comparison to the sixteenth century composition of that
idiom branch (about 120 units) constitutes almost ten per cent. What survived
included above all idiomatic expressions having a comprehensible lexical composition,
easy to remember (short, rhymed, with alliterations), and of a fabulous
or ancient provenance, as well as represented by big textual frequency (at least
20 to over 60 entries) and variancy. Unstable, on the other hand, appeared those
units with archaic lexical components, referring to the conventional layer that is
not clear nowadays (especially fishing techniques and beliefs), having a complex
syntactic structure (too long, and devoid of rhymes and alliterations) as well as
those that were not accepted in a language for unknown reasons (they were rarely
repeated, and had little variants). |