Book as a Part of Phraseology (with examples in Modern Romanian, Greek and Serbian)

Abstract

The present paper is devoted to a brief analysis of recorded idiomatic expressions in three modern Balkan languages: Romanian, Greek and Serbian, containing the lexeme carte / βιβλίο / књига as their keyword. In the history of human society, book has always played a special role which could be described as a role of a so-called knowledge container with strong symbolic meanings – this feature gradually became one of its predominant ones in almost all cultures. Even though these idiomatic constructions do not form a large thematic group – in total the number of all examined examples is 66 – the fact is that the aforementioned lexeme fulfils the role of a linguocultureme in the languages in question. There have been observed two groups of idioms – the first one consists of those whose structure and meaning are absolutely convergent and concordant with the corresponding idiomatic expressions found in other European languages, for example, είμαι κλειστό βιβλίο = бити затворена књига= a fi ca o carte închisă, or nu judeca cartea după coperta sa = να μην κρίνεις ένα βιβλίο από το εξώφυλλό του = не суди о књизи по корицама. The second group is composed of such idiomatic expressions which can be found only in one language, respectively. In other words, they are identified as special units because they remain the property of only one language, they are absolutely individual forms in terms of their meaning, morphological structure, use and expressiveness; e.g. ai carte, ai parte, or a lega cartea de gard.