The Čakavian hust ‘a bush, a shrub’, Kajkavian husta/hosta ‘a forest; shrubs, bushes, an overgrowth, a thicket’

Leksik hrvatskih narječja, koji sada sve bolje poznajemo zahvaljujući mnogobrojnim rječnicima pojedinih govora, sadrži veliki broj zanimljivih riječi, domaćih i posuđenih, ali nerijetko bez zadovoljavajućega etimološkoga objašnjenja ili bez ikakve etimologije. Ovaj mali prilog pokušaj je pronalaženja porijekla jednoga dijalekatnoga leksičkoga gnijezda. Velika mi je čast posvetiti ga našem svečaru akademiku Milanu Mogušu koji je svojim temeljnim radovima produbio poznavanje povijesti hrvatskoga jezika, hrvatskih narječja te bitno dopridonio poznavanju suvremenoga i povijesnoga hrvatskoga dijalekatnoga leksika, posebno čakavskoga.This etymological contribution considers a group of lexemes which are closely related phonetically and semantically: Čakavian hust ‘a bush, a shrub; a degenerated hemp bush’, husti pl. ‘bushes, an overgrowth, a thicket’ (on the Istrian Peninsula), 15th–16th c. Old Croatian hust ‘a multitude, a plethora, a swarm, a band’, Kajkavian husta/hosta ‘forest’, in early sources also ‘a forest to be cut; bushes, an overgrowth, a thicket’; the closest equivalents in Slovene hộsta (also hộst in dialects) ‘a forest; bushes, an overgrowth, a thicket; dry twigs’. The alternation of the root vowel u/o indicates the original *ǫ. Therefore, the aforementioned words allegedly continue the proto-forms *chǫstъ and *chǫsta. It is likely that the East Slavic name for ‘a bush / a thicket’ is cognate with these words: Russian, Belarusian, and dialectal Ukrainian kust, with a syllable-onset *k- without an s-mobile. This comparison enables us to reconstruct the earlier Proto-Slavic forms *(s)kǫstъ and *(s)kǫsta, whereas *(s)kǫstъ may be derived from an earlier *(s)kǫp-t-, with the suffix *-to- and with the development of the consonantal group -pt- > -st-. This could have been a derivative from Proto-Slavic *kǫpa ‘a curved, convex thing which projects from the surrounding area’ (e.g. ‘a height, a group of trees, bushes, which resembles a height’). In the form *(s)kǫsta, one may perceive a variant of the suffix *-tā or an archaic collectivum with the suffix *-ā from *(s)kǫstъ