Abstract
Curses are attested not just since early literary sources but already on epigraphical material (tabulae defixionum) in the Graeco-Roman classical antiquity since the early 6th cent. BC.
The aim of the presentation is to give a deeper overview of the curses (Lat. defixiones, Gk. Katadesmoi "binding curses") of selected ancient (primarily Vedic, Old Greek, Latin, Celtic and Germanic) and modern (primarily Romani and Slavic) Indo-European languages with overlap to other language families to show the typological similarities, resp. differences between single languages.
In doing so we will try to show the crucial passages from ancient languages and analyze them from etymological, formal, structural, semantic and content point of view. We will show what constructions, resp. formulas and types of curses are used most often, which procedures are shared by different cultures and in different places.
Common ideas and scenarios of cursing can tell us more about the conceptualization of various subjects and phenomena. Other part of the presentation - based on a long ongoing field research - will present curses from a slightly different point of view.
It will reveal the causes, various ways of current cursing practices and sociolinguistic aspects of malediction in Romani. This research is carried out for several years among speakers of the so-called North-Central Romani in Middle Europe (mostly in Slovakia and Czech Republic) but in some Balkan countries as well.
After the original data will be presented, we will try to set a typological schemes and cursing patterns, which could give us deeper insight in the minds of the ancient and modern people and simultaneously could demonstrate how they perceived the surrounding world. One of other aims of the presentation is to set forth a stricter methodology in order to make a clear boundary between cursing and oaths which are sometimes put in one category.
This diachronic approach will also elucidate the cursing strategies, trace them into past, demonstrate which of them are inherited and survived until present day.