The paper analyses phrasemes, taken from lexicographic sources, with lexemes that belong to the semantic field “water” as a component in Greek, Latin and Croatian. A total of eighteen Greek, thirty nine Latin and thirty five Croatian phrasemes are analysed and some of them also have several phraseological variations. The phrasemes contain lexemes water, river, stream, well-source, sea, wave, drop, rain, mud, wet, white, to pour. These lexemes have different distribution in Greek, Latin and Croatian and the phrasemes in question can be divided into three groups based on the presence of individual lexemes. Therefore the aim is to determine the degree of their equivalence within the framework of structural, semantic and conceptual analysis. Only nine phrasemes in all three languages have the same phraseological meaning and the same or similar structure with lexical equivalence. The analysis of lexical structure shows that Croatian phrasemes have far more lexical variants compared to the classical languages. Such a discrepancy can be explained by a small amount of language material and smaller share of spoken language in the preserved corpus of classical languages. Although we might expect to find equivalent phrases in languages that were in close contact, semantic analysis shows that the correspondence between Latin and Greek is not much larger than that between the classical languages and the Croatian language. Conceptual analysis classifies phrasemes according to concepts which are divided into three groups. The most numerous are phrasemes related to humans (73%), which confirms the anthropocentric orientation in phraseology. The results of contrastive analysis reveal that a large number of phrasemes, although belonging to the same semantic and conceptual framework, in classical languages and Croatian have a different conceptual background.

phraseme; semantic field “water”; Greek language; Latin language; Croatian language; contrastive analysis