Eating beyond certainties

The aim of this study is to give a crosslinguistic account of semantic paralellisms concerning verbs meaning “eat”. It is mainly based on both synchronic and diachronic data from Indo-European languages, and some comparisons are made with data from a few languages from other genetic stocks: Nahuatl, Mwotlap, Inuit and classical Arabic. The semantic parallelisms are organized semantically into three categories: concrete aspects, perceptual aspects and cognitive aspects. The study of the data suggests the possibility that there exists some universal semantic association for the concept of eating with the concepts of suffering and tormenting.