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The renowned Carniolan polyhistorian Johann Weichard V (1641–1693) wrote his work Glory of the Duchy of Carniola inspired by a patriotic urge to acquaint foreigners and fellow countrymen with his homeland and thus raise its prominence. The paper focuses on presentations of urban spaces which most concisely refl ect cultural heritage, while it also shows how the awareness of cultural heritage contributes to shaping collective identity. The presented analysis concentrates on the spatial perception of the duchy and its towns, on their descriptions in the context of space and time, as well as on the corresponding pictorial matter and its relation to the text.
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The article focuses on practices of modern Russian media discourse contributing to the formation of the cult of Vladimir Putin. The following practices, which occur mainly in the pro-government media forming the officious ideology, were detected and described: 1) the use of the specific nomination ‘national leader’ emphasizing the unique status of Vladimir Putin; 2) building up his image as the star of popular culture, balancing between the ordinary and the unique; 3) the equalization of Vladimir Putin and Russia. At the same time it is shown that the practices mentioned above meet resistance mainly by the so-called opposition media. The major means of resistance are 1) critical interpretation of these practices, for example by including concepts of the official ideology into critical context; 2) an explication of the cult of personality, which is negatively perceived in Russian society.
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This article considers the quality of ‘Byzantis’ – “Constantinopolitan-ness” – as a trait, which accompanies particular Byzantines who journey outside of the imperial capital and into the liminal or frontier spaces of Byzantium. The word itself is a middle/late Byzantine form of the toponymic adjective byzantios, which appears as early as Thucydides to describe an inhabitant of Constantinople (former Byzantion). This form, which has acquired connotations of being Constantinopolitan (as an attitude or mode of life) as well as being from Constantinople, becomes commonly employed in the 10th and 11th centuries, when not used precisely to refer to someone’s origins, to contrast the Constantinopolitan with the non-Constantinopolitan – Rhomaioi with barbaroi. Those individuals who are able to carry Byzantis with them despite being absent from Constantinople itself render the inhospitable landscapes through which they travel suddenly hospitable again. The article presents two case studies and some further corroborating data from word frequency analysis performed with the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. The fi rst case study appears in the early 11th century correspondence of Philetos Synadenos, krites of Tarsus, and Nikephoros Ouranos, doux of Antioch. Synadenos claims that Ouranos’s possession of Byzantis is what makes Antioch a bastion of Byzantine culture despite being on the far edge of the empire. The second case study discusses the Hodoiporikon of Constantine Manasses. In this text, Manasses reported on his journey in the company of the sebastos John Kontostephanos through Asia Minor on a political mission, which eventually goes awry, trapping Manasses alone without the sebastos in Cyprus. Isolated, Manasses succumbed to illness, homesickness, and cultural loneliness. This illness and depression is relieved when the sebastos returned to Manasses’ company. The sebastos – a fellow Constantinopolitan – had, in essence, brought Constantinople to him via his presence.
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This is a report on the Seventh International Symposium on Balkan Studies, which was held in Brno, on 28 and 29 November 2016. It was organized by the Institute of Slavic Studies at Masaryk University, together with the Moravian Museum and the Institute of History, part of the Czech Academy of Sciences. More than sixty historians, political scientists, philologists, ethnologists, and other specialists from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Balkan countries, and Poland, participated in the symposium. In three sections, they presented papers about the history of the Balkans and Czecho-Slovak-Balkan relations: (i) history, ethnology, political science; (ii) linguistics; and (iii) literature and culturology.
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Our knowledge about the mechanisms underlying the creation of Excerpta historica Constantiniana (EC) – an encyclopedia commissioned by the Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos in 10th century Byzantium – is still insuffi cient, despite a number of important studies. This paper sets out to approach this question on the basis of textual repetitions present in the text of EC. The overall goal is to shed light on the principles and methodology that were guiding the compilers of EC. In particular, the focus of this study lies on repetitions, i.e. those text passages of the same author that appear in at least two diff erent places in EC; Such pairs of passages are denoted as reiterations in the following. Overall, 54 pairs of reiterations were identifi ed by using automated tools and then analyzed. The respective length of the reiterated passages ranges from 8 to 150 words per reiteration; the reiterated passages were found in 101 excerpts. The subsequent analysis reveals two main types: the subset type and the intersection type. The former is found when the excerpt attesting the reiteration also contains a text not present in the counterpart excerpt. In turn, the latter type is found when only one of the excerpts contains a text not present in the counterpart excerpt. The two main types can be further classifi ed into two subtypes each: transition, patchworking, extraction, and duplication. The analysis of these types allows to reconstruct the workfl ow of the excerptors, in turn illuminating the methodology of the entire EC project.
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During the reign of Ivan IV Muscovite authors increasingly used the word Ros and its derivatives, from the Byzantine Greek Rosia, in addition to Rus’ and its derivatives. Scholars attribute usage of Ros to Muscovy’s imperial pretensions. However, while Ros was often employed in imperial contexts, it also appeared in ecclesiastical contexts. Moreover, an additional form, Rusia, complicates drawing a clear contrast between usage of Rus’ and Ros. All three forms coexisted throughout Ivan IV’s reign.
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The aim of this article is to examine the functions of characters’ proper names in Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett – a second novel in the City Watch Cycle. The study is based on the theory of “Two Acts” which divides the analysed functions into the permanent and the momentary. The first are identified, defined and discussed on the basis of the naming act in Men at Arms and the latter undergo an analogous process on the basis of the act of using a name in the novel.
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This brief paper aims to study some of the aspects of onomastics and toponymy inmedieval Maghreb using sources written in Arabic and Berber (10th–19th centuries).Three specific linguistic elements stand out: hybrid toponymic formations (Arabic andBerber), “cross-bred” anthroponyms and the contact between Islamic and Christianreligious topography. Among other points, we must insist on the importance of studyinga larger number of written sources in order to be able to build a sufficient bodyof evidence and hence more accurately portray the linguistic landscape of medievalMaghreb. This could be focussed on the detailed examination of the names of placesand people for instance, without forgetting the fundamental contributions of otherresearch instruments such as history and geography.
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Jennifer Jenkins, Will Baker & Martin Dewey (eds.): The Routledge Handbook of English as a Lingua Franca. New York: Routledge, 2018. xix+620 pp.
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Světla Čmejrková: Jazyk a dialog: Výbor z textů. Edited by Jana Hoffmannová & Petr Kaderka. Praha: NLN, 2019. 506 pp. Sociolingvistická edice: Jazyk,společnost, interakce, 3.
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This text is devoted to the academic work and life of the Czech linguist Petr Karlík, who celebrates his 70th birthday in 2021.
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The late Hellenistic pseudepigraph Joseph and Aseneth narrates the story of the noble-born Egyptian Aseneth who became the wife of Jacob’s son Joseph after conversion. The text was originally written in Greek and was later translated into a number of languages. A second Latin translation of the work appeared at the turn of the 12th and 13th centuries (today labelled as L1). An abridged version of L1 is contained in the Chronicon of Helinand of Froidmont. His version of L1 was used (word-for-word) by Vincent of Beauvais in the Speculum historiale. Vincent added a summary of chapters 41–47 from the book of Genesis, as well as excerpts from the Historia scholastica, placing everything within Joseph’s story. This attractive narrative dubbed the Historia Ioseph et Aseneth was also copied outside the Speculum and was translated into Czech at the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries. This translation was based on the Bohemian version of Historia Ioseph et Aseneth.The Old Czech translation has survived in six manuscripts from the second half of the 15th century, and also in prints from the 16th and 17th centuries. Joseph and Aseneth is recorded as an individual work in two manuscripts, while in the remaining four it is an organic component of an extensive narrative about Joseph, his father, and his brothers. As can be seen by the comparison of all relevant texts, the Old Czech manuscripts of Joseph and Aseneth offer dual translations: they are based on the differences in the original Latin texts and reflect distinct translation strategies. A looser (sense-for-sense) translation is apparently found in the language change “z úst růží” (de ore rosarum) and is seemingly older, while the second, younger translation is word-for-word and interprets the proper reading of the Latin text “z rosy růží” (de rore rosarum). The tendency for word-for-word translations of the Latin text associates the newer translation with some Old Czech Biblical translations that appeared before the mid-15th century.
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This paper discusses translations of biblical passages into Kashubian, which originated in the Lutheran circles between the 16th and the 19th centuries, followed by translations made in the Catholic circles in the 20th and the 21st centuries. The history of these translations has been divided into two periods: “old translations” and “contemporary translations.” The former comprise various bibli[1]cal texts preserved in manuscripts and printed monuments, which came into being between 1586 and the second half of the 19th century. The fundamental texts of this period include the works by Szymon Krofey (1586), Michał Pontanus (1643), and Perykopy smołdzińskie (1699–1701). The old translations were done from German in the Protestant circles in West Pomerania. In turn, the “contemporary trans[1]lations” of biblical texts into Kashubian embrace translations from the second half of the 20th century, which were produced in the Catholic environment of Gdańsk Pomerania: from Latin (Mk 4:3-20) by Alojzy Nagel (1973), from Latin (four Gospels) by Rev. Franciszek Grucza (1992), from Polish (the New Testament and the Psalms) by Eugeniusz Gołąbek (1993–2007) and my own translations from Hebrew and Greek (the Four Gospels, the Pentateuch, Ecclesiastes) prepared in 2001–2020.
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The article analyses the meaning of the word genius in the expression feminine genius, which was introduced into the Catholic Church's discourse on gender by Pope John Paul II. The author shows that this new use of the word genius is based on its already existing meanings, but is not identical with them. The new sense is understood broadly as a set of judgments of different status, having both a subjective character (connected with someone's concept) and a discourse character (included in the "order" of a given discourse, in this case the Catholic discourse). In the descriptive layer, genius (feminine/feminine) signifies the (essentialist and complementary) essence of gender, but also very important is the highly positive meaning of the word, which connotes (and at the same time communicates) information about being exceptional, extraordinary, distinguished by the fact of belonging to one's gender, and it is a message addressed mainly to women.
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The subject of this study is the meaning of the words anima, spiritus and mens in the metrical sepulchral inscriptions in the Carmina Latina Epigraphica collection published at the end of the 19th century by Franz Buecheler. This collection comprises almost 1,900 texts, of which around 1,400 are funerary and, particularly, sepulchral inscriptions. This article consists of three sections. The first contains general comments on Roman sepulchral inscriptions. The second, and most important part uses a conventional philological method to analyze the words in the source texts that denote the immaterial aspect of the human being that continues after death. The analysis of the texts reveals that the word anima occurs about 80 times, spiritus – 20, and mens only three times. These three words stand for what is usually expressed by the word “soul,” that is, the spiritual, immaterial aspect of the human being. Conclusions are presented gradually as the analytical compilation proceeds. Firstly, there is no semantic difference between anima and spiritus; although the word animus which is close to the three words discussed in this paper does not occur in this sense in the inscriptions. Secondly, both pagan and Christian inscriptions emphasize the dichotomy between anima or spiritus and corpus or caro (alternatively membra); some Christian inscriptions, pointing to this dichotomy, express belief in the resurrection. Thirdly, despite the difference in beliefs, Roman worshipers and Christians used very similar patterns of statements about the posthumous fate of the soul, for example, astra tenent animam, astra fovent animam, anima migravit ad astra or spiritus astra tenet, spiritus petit ad astra, mens caeli perget ad astra, which means that the Christian funerary language did not develop its distinct terminology for several centuries. The third section is a very brief summary of the study carried out.
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