@Dave, hah, sorry about that, it seems like you posted your comment maybe about 40 seconds later. Well, great minds and all that, I suppose.

You're right about different adjectival forms (it's <em>мировой</em> for <em>world</em> and <em>мирный </em>for <em>peace</em>), and yes, the words indeed were spelled somewhat differently from ~the end of the 17th century until the orthography reform of 1918 (there was actually a massive argument about one novel by Tolstoy which you know by the name "War and Peace" — some people believed he actually meant "War and the World" or something like that, but they were probably wrong because in all but one edition it was spelled "миръ" in the pre-revolutionary orthography. As for the space station Mir, as far as I know they originally meant "peace", but I've always seen it as a nice double entendre since both meanings make sense.

Hmm, Im curious how this thing was described by Jan Hus who wrote first complete work about the Czech language. Do you know it? Remember that in XIX century Czech language was strongly rusified by the Czech artists, scientists and philosophers influenced by the Russian artists scientists from that period.

This topic is very interesting!

In Russian:

"мир" - [mir] - world (and peace)

"свет" [svet] - light(noun), but it also means "world" in some phrases

In Czech:

"svět" - world

"světlo" - light(noun)

In Hungarian:

"világ" - world, seldom it also means "light"(noun)

"világos" means "bright" and "light" (as adjective if we speak about a color)

Although Hungarian isn't Slavic (and even not Indo-european) language, we can see a connection between "world" and "light" in all three languages!

Thanks, interesting read and it's always interesting to see how many words in Czech I can recognize through Polish.

EDIT: I see Kseniia beat me to writing about Russian while I was writing this post. Just as well.

You gave an example for Russian, and I don't know more than a few words in it, but "mir" made me think of the old Russian space station of the same name. I remembered it meaning "peace", but apparently it could also mean "world". Although from what I read now the words used to be spelled somewhat differently in older Russian texts and the adjectival forms are supposedly different in both words.

Its also interesting that besides "mír", Czech also has pokoj, which I'd recognize as "(s)pokój", and apparently can also simply mean "room" (like in a house). But can it truly also mean "apartment"?

Tomáš, that's very interesting, I'd never thought about it before. I must say that <em>весь мир = all world = universe</em> makes total sense to me, and <em>vesmír = all peace = universe</em> seems much more vague (though indeed nice and I like the word too).

It's just that in Russian, the word <em>мир</em> can mean both (<em>world</em> and <em>peace</em>; in fact, there's even one popular phrase that illustrates it perfectly, "Миру — мир" (lit. to-world — peace). And, as far as I know, in Old Slavic the word <em>миръ</em> already had these two meanings (later on in Russian people started to write the two words as "миръ" = peace and "мiръ" = world/universe to differentiate between them (the pronunciations were the same), but this difference was somewhat artificial, they were written the same until the end of the 17th century). I'm not sure about Proto-Slavic, though. So you're saying that you think that in Czech the word mír never really had the same meaning as the word svět?