Secondary interjections of religious origin
The paper presents preliminary results of a survey devoted to interjections of religious origin in Polish and German. All expressions examined suggest a continuing process of desacralization of religious vocabulary in the colloquial styles of both, Polish and German languages. The data shows that Polish does not have blasphemic interjections referring to Pan Bóg “Lord/God”, krzyż “crucifix”, sakrament “sacrament” and męka/krew Chrystusa “the suffering/blood of Jesus Christ” whereas in German the most equivalent expressions are commonly used as curses cf. examples 2, 6–8 in the appendix. German dictionaries also mention several interjections containing Himmel “heaven” cf. example 5. German, on the other hand, lacks interjections connected with “mother” cf. 4 and “wound” cf. 6. Interjections of the type Jesus that can also be found in German dictionaries are obsolete. The classification of some more or less religious Polish interjections as curses is controversial Maciej Grochowski 1996, Anna Wierzbicka 1996. It seems that a thorough analysis of the interjections in question should also rely on the data from spoken Polish, above all on the description of intonation contours and sentence stress.