Source — Wiktionary, "lítý" (Czech) and Proto-Slavic "*ľutъ" reconstruction

Title: lítý; Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/ľutъ
Publication: English Wiktionary
URLs: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lítý; https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/ľutъ
Accessed: 2026-09-03
Type: tertiary (crowdsourced but citation-disciplined lexicographic source, per this project's standing treatment of Wiktionary).

Extract

lítý (Czech, literary register today): "Inherited from Old Czech ľútý, from Proto-Slavic *ľutъ."

Proto-Slavic *ľutъ — descendants list (language: reflex, gloss as given):

East Slavic: Old East Slavic лютъ (ljutŭ); Old Ruthenian лю́тый (ljútyj); Belarusian лю́ты (ljúty); Ukrainian лю́тий (ljútyj); Russian лю́тый (ljútyj) — all continuing an adjectival sense in the "fierce/harsh" range.
South Slavic: Old Church Slavonic лютъ (ljutŭ); Bulgarian лют (ljut, "spicy, hot" — of food); Macedonian лут (lut); Serbo-Croatian љу̑т/ljȗt.
West Slavic: Old Czech ľútý; Czech lítý (literary, "fierce"); Old Polish luty; Polish luty ("biting, cold" — of weather; obsolete outside this sense, though it survives as the name of the month February); Slovak ľúty (literary); Lower Sorbian luty ("pure").

None of the listed pan-Slavic descendants of the shared root carry the specific "regret/self-pity/torment at one's own misery" sense that Czech lítost (a separate derived noun, not itself listed here) carries. The root is authentically pan-Slavic, but on this page's evidence the emotional-regret meaning is a Czech-specific semantic development from the general "fierce, harsh" sense — not, on current evidence, a concept independently lexicalized the same way across the wider Slavic family the way ubuntu's root is across Bantu languages. This project has not independently checked Polish/Slovak/Russian dictionaries for cognates of the noun lítost itself (as opposed to the adjective lítý) — see cambridge-litosc-polish.md for the one such check performed (Polish).
This page does not itself discuss lítost or Kundera; it documents only the wider root family the word descends from.