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This paper analyses the etymology of the Romanian verbs with the meaning ‘to speak’: "a cuvânta", "a grăi" and "a vorbi". We discuss the origin of a cuvânta, a Balkan Romance word derived from "cuvânt" ‘word’, with parallels in other Balkan languages, especially in Albanian, Macedonian and Serbian, and of the Slavic borrowing "a grăi", which changed its meaning from ‘croaking’ to ‘speaking’. However, we focus on the origin of the verb "a vorbi", which has not been satisfactorily and fully explained until now. We reject the older hypothesis that sustains it was formed on the basis of the noun "vorbă", a variant of the Slavonic borrowing "dvorbă". We try to demonstrate that it should be regarded as a phonetic variant of the older form "a vorovi", which meant intially ‘to make noise’, but is attested with the meaning ‘to speak’ since the 16th century. Most probably, the verb "a vorovi" represents a contamination between two verbs that reproduce the Balkan Slavic verbs "govoriti" and "vreviti", both of them meaning ‘to make noise’.
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The article discusses the 62 words coined, according to DEX (Dicționarul explicativ al limbii române), by contamination (Ro. contaminare), a special type of lexical blending. However, at a closer look, 25 words seem to have other etymological interpretations. The remaining 37 blends are analysed in an attempt to find the succesful blending patterns, since these patterns seem to be language-specific.
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The Chinese term rou doukou has generally been taken to mean ‘nutmeg’. This identification dates from the nineteenth century. However, there is reason to think that rou doukou was originally not nutmeg, but the fruits of a plant of the ginger family, Zingiberaceae. Early descriptions and illustrations of rou doukou are clearly not of nutmeg: in Chinese pharmacopoeias, it is usually listed with herbs, not trees. The earliest reference to nutmeg is probably in the Zhu fan zhi of 1225. However, most Chinese references to rou doukou long after that date still refer to a plant of the ginger family.
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The Northern English dialect has always been a source of curiosities and many contrasts, boggling the mind of linguists who would wish to confine it within some limits of linguistic definitions. Starting from its Old English forefather, Northumbrian, onwards, the Northern dialect has proved to be both influential and resistant to external influences. Its borders defy clear categorization as understood by clear-cut variables, providing more for a fuzzy and volatile framework of relations among different Northern varieties. This is somewhat justified by the very nature of the Northern speech which seems to be a product of as much the history as the culture and tradition so deeply rooted in the hearts of Northerners. Against the backdrop of folklore and popular myths surrounding the local varieties, the Northern tongue has developed its unique features based on two contrasting linguistic trends in morphology and phonology. Among those, one can observe strong innovative and influential tendencies in the area of morphology and much resistance to changes or external influences in terms of phonology. It seems particularly surprising that the phonological analysis of the Northern dialect will very often appear to be an analysis of the dialect of the past with many characteristics having remained unaltered since the old times and being now a symbol of pride and affinity for a particular social group. The aim of this article is to investigate some of those phonological relics, trying to “establish historical continuities” and relating the today’s forms to the past.
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The text refers to the publishing series entitled "My z Nich" – it concerns a series of publications presenting the heritage of Polish linguists. The author of the review presents the value of the publication: he emphasizes that the authors of the articles in each volume resemble the achievements of the late masters, but also present a critical look at their scientific achievements and contribution to the development of the discipline.
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The aim of the paper is to present ephemeral printed texts as an object of a linguistic description as well as to submit the model of analysis in practice. Texts called as ephemera are usually an object of a non-linguistically targeted interdisciplinary approach, although ephemera, regardless of type and style, can be subject to the scheme of a linguistic analysis. The submitted Linguera model (lingua et ephemera) enables meticulous analysis of an ephemeral text followed by its detailed and accurate analysis. The model focuses on such aspects as the role of context, evaluative language, contents and form of ephemera, as well as analytical map designing. The proposal of analysis is presented on the material of the ephemera collection from the Free City of Danzig (1920 – 1939).
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The paper deals with the peripheral Czech lexeme sluzej 'bridge beam'. This word was analyzed in the journal Naše řeč as early as in 1923. The current paper corrects the assumption of the author at that time that the noun was adopted from another Slavic language in relatively recent times, and confirms its direct borrowing from German in the early modern period. The spelling of this lexeme, however, was different from the one reconstructed by etymologists so far.
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The main objective of the present study is to observe the influence of English on the Cape Verdean language, taking into account the historical events and the linguistic contacts between the languages in question. It is intended to observe how Anglicisms have been introduced in different contexts, especially in recent times, therefore, without forgetting the British and American influence in Cape Verde in past cen- turies and its impact on the lexicon. The semantic fields covered include, among others, new technologies, sports and music (rap kriol). The present descriptive research is based mainly on digital sources, such as social networks, online press, dictionaries available online and song texts. In conclusion, the analysis car- ried out proves the constant presence of Anglicisms in Cape Verdean reality, as well as their flow related to the emergence of new phenomena that need to be named.
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The article presents selected achievements of Indo-European linguistics that have been made since the beginning of the 20th century up to the present, concentrating especially on the laryngeal theory, the reconstruction of the proto-language accent-ablaut paradigms, internal derivation and the Caland system. The author observes that there are no Polish scientific publications describing the current state of research and, as a consequence, most of the Polish publications that deal with the Proto-Indo-European era are based on outdated reconstructions.
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The article presents the results of an analysis of the methods of marking consonants v and v́ in Szczyt duszny (‘Spiritual shield’), a collection of prayers from the prayer book of Olbracht Gasztołd from 1528. The analysis covered the quantitative parameters of the markings and their positional determinants (word, phonetic and lexical). The results of the analysis made it possible to formulate a hypothesis about presence of the doublelip articulation of the consonants v and v́ in the Małopolska variant of the Polish language in the first half of the 16th century, this being a relic of the old pronunciation, preserved in the intervocal position and in the post-vocal position in the forehead of the word.
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The paper examines the guidelines dedicated to Italian teaching and, above all, to the ideal thematic, language and stylistic features of school reading books in the programmes for primary school and in the related instructions for teachers issued by the Ministry of Education from 1860 to 1905: a decisive period for the arrangement of the Italian school system, the literacy processes and the spread of the national language. It can be seen how these official documents significantly shaped the writing of school books. The paper also explores the complex relationship between the institutional attempts to regulate textbook production, as evidenced by relevant ministerial documentation parallel to the programmes, and the rich publishing activity in this field. To complete the overview of the dialectic between school-educational publishing and the regulatory will of the Ministry and of the boards connected to it, responsible for the evaluation of textbooks, the witnesses of two prominent school female authors of the 2nd half of the 19th century are commented on: Ida Baccini and Felicita Morandi.
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In this study, we aim to analyse the origin and semantics of one of the lexemes used by Romanians to refer to Hungarians: boanghin(a), also used as boanghen(a). Besides a meta-analysis of this ethnic slur (emergence, meaning, semantic shifts, and etymology), we also refer to literary works in which these terms have been used. The archaic boanghin, or boanghen seems to be a political construct which has the purpose of naming the enemy and personifying the evil. It is a typical case of verbal abuse, mockery, or insult which used to display a significant amount of collectively formed, pejorative connotation. Today it is old-fashioned, as it has been replaced by another slur, i.e. bozgor, which is going to be presented in a forthcoming study.
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While making an indisputably relevant contribution to scholarship and Slavic culture, the discussions about the primacy of one or the other Slavic alphabet, Glagolitic or Cyrillic, and the presentations of their results or the elaborations on the issue that have ensued over the following decades, were very often burdened with stereotypes, errors and other shortcomings. A particularly peculiar case is the construction of an ideological narrative about inventing the Cyrillic alphabet at the behest of the Bulgarian prince, later Emperor Symeon, and its promotion as the official state and church alphabet at the Council of Preslav (893), which Angel Nikolov demonstrated to be unproven and questionable as a historical event, due to which anything related to it could not be verified. The hypothesis that Constantine the Philosopher (Cyril) followed the common patterns of Byzantine literacy of the time (primarily the practice of the Studite Monastery) to create a Slavic alphabet with two complementary graphical variants, Proto-Glagolitic and Proto-Cyrillic, should be taken seriously into consideration. To meet the need to simplify the complex model, but also to adapt it to the sensitivity of the Western Church, it had to be reduced to the Glagolitic alphabet, although the Cyrillic alphabet was also passively retained. Regardless of the sequence of creating the alphabets and the date when the Cyrillic alphabet was finally created, there are at least two cases where the presence of the Greek alphabet must be assumed. In the analysis and transcription of the Slavic phonological system, Constantine used the Greek alphabet. The created provisional Greek apparatus was the prototype of “both” Slavic alphabets, and especially of the Cyrillic alphabet. Also, the process of introducing others to the Slavic alphabet and spreading literacy must have been accompanied by deciphering already in the initial stages, where, again, the Greek alphabet was used. Thus, it can be assumed that the creation of the Slavic-Greek and Slavic-Latin abecedaria as interpretative-mnemonic compositions is related to Constantine (863–869).
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In this paper we deal with the distribution of adverbial demonstratives in Serbian literacy, i.e. with their use in the literary and vernacular language. Considering the fact that the system of pronouns in the Serbian language has undergone certain changes, the aim of the paper is to determine whether these changes affected the pronominal bases in spatial demonstratives, since they are all characterized by having a pronoun in their bases. A review of existing literature regarding these words showed that the Serbian-Slavonic language preserved the inherited state, while spatial demonstratives in the vernacular followed the changes in pronouns (e.g., the replacement of demonstratives based on the pronoun *s- with those based on the pronoun *ov-). It has also been shown that interfering with the demonstratives in the field of distality is not something that is only related to the modern Serbian language, but has also been noticed in earlier epochs of the development of the Serbian language.
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The paper analyzes certain phonological characteristics of the Accounting Ledger Journal of the Church of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, the document that has been kept under this name in the said church in Arad (under the signature INV 794). The document contains two protocols: the first one that was kept from 1728 until 1782 and the second one kept from 1776 until 1790. This paper analyzes the corpus from the first half of the 18th century (more precisely, the time period from 1728 until 1752). Since this is a text that encompasses two periods on the timeline: (1) the period in which Russian-Slavonic substituted Serbian-Slavonic and (2) the period in which Slavonic-Serbian was established and in which it existed – the basic task of this research is the identification of the language in which the Accounting Ledger Journal was written. In the paper, special attention is paid to the relation between vernacular and literary elements in the analyzed document, as well as to the dependence of their use on various contextual parameters. The analysis of the selected phonological characteristics of the Accounting Ledger Journal of the Church of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul (1728–1752) indicates the chronological matching with the data from previous research of documents with a similar profile on the territory of South Hungary. The fourth and fifth decade is, in fact, the time that saw a more prominent penetration of Russian-Slavonic elements into manuscripts. Their number, however, is not large enough to regard it as a mixed language. The Accounting Ledger Journal as a whole still had a vernacular basis, which confirms the previous assumption concerning the elitization of folk language as the basic model for creating the Slavonic-Serbian language in the manuscripts of the 18th century. The analysis also shows that literary features (Serbian-Slavonic and Russian-Slavonic) were conditioned primarily by the thematic and structural organization of the text, as well as the social stratification of the people mentioned in the aforementioned document.
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In this article, I analyze the philological ideas of the Serbian intellectual D. Tirol (1793–1857), as displayed in his first linguistic work Славенска граматика (1827). The views of the author about the development of the Slavic language, as well as his comments upon the normalization of the Serbian language standard, which reveal the influence of Josef Dobrovský and Vuk Karadžić, are also examined. In this context, I reach the conclusion that the innovative character of the linguistic conception of Tirol is due to the interaction of two methodological paradigms – Church Slavonic grammar tradition and comparative linguistics in the first half of the nineteenth century.
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The article presents the basic theoretical principles of the interpretation of the term concept and attempts to reformulate it in relation to views of contemporary researchers. The main principles of anal-ysis of the concepts are outlined. The paper offers an analysis of the concepts of UP / DOWN, whichrepresent verbalisation of spiritual culture concepts (the triad heaven – earth – hell). The concept UPis represented by names associated with heaven (гóри небéсні, горá госпóдня, горíшне, гóрницяСіóнська), the concept DOWN is associated with earth (діл земни ́й, доли ́ на світовá, долище,межигори земнí, падíл зéмний, падóлок, юдóль) and hell (діл, долище пресподнє, доли ́ на пéкла,преспóдня). On the basis of this, the research made it possible to establish two semantic oppositions:heaven / earth and heaven / hell. An analysis of dialectal and historical materials allowed the au-thor to present the structural-semantic units that form the nominal field of the concepts UP / DOWN.The subject of the study was systematically presented at the supradialectal level, the singularitiesof the representation of concepts in Ukrainian dialects were explained, and their territorial variationwas revealed. Emphasis is placed on the importance of the study of dialect material, as it is the studyof dialects that allows the reconstruction of fragments of the dialect image of the world which havenot been verbalised in literary language.
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The present article investigates the problem of the etymology and development of the Latin word vir, ‘man,’ usually assumed to have descended from the Proto-Indo-European form *u ̯ ih1-ró-, ‘man’, but with somewhat irregular and not commonly accepted pretonic shortening of thevowel in view of the cognates in Indo-Iranian and Baltic. The short eningis usually explained as an effect of Dybo’s Rule, but it is pointed out that there might be a simpler solution to explaining the change, namely, the so-called Osthoff’s law, which occurred in the prehistory and history of Latinat least three times.
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