Rocznik Slawistyczny

Obituary for Antoni Furdal, an eminent linguist, specialist in Polish and Slavic studies, theory of language and semiotics. The text presents some of his most important achievements in each of these fields.

Obituary of Eric Pratt Hamp, one of the leading Indo-Europeanist of the 20th and early 21st centuries. An etymologist, dialectologist, and researcher of lesser known languages and dialects, his work also contributed to every known branch of Indo-European, but especially Albanian, Arbëresh, Arvanitika, as well as Resian and all the Celtic languages. He also contributed signifi cantly to the study of Native American languages, especially Quileute.

This paper describes the characteristic lexicon in the Devic’ katastichos, the monastery book of the monastery Devic in the vicinity of the town of Srbica in Kosovo and Metohija. In this book, the priests wrote down the gifts that the believers gave them from 1762 to 1789. Based on the name of the believers, the names of the places from which they originated, their professions, based on the list of gifts to the monastery, the measurements determining the weight, volume or length of gifts, a clear picture can be formed about the dynamic life of Serbs in Kosovo and Metohija during the 18th century, as well as the active life of Devic Monastery, to which the gifts were donated by the Orthodox Serbs, and also by the Albanians. According to the 2011 census, there are no more Serbs in Srbica, and the Monastery Devic was damaged in both World Wars and was burned down in 1999 and 2004. The work is dedicated to the celebration of eight centuries of autocephality of Serbian Orthodox Church (1219–2019), and consequently the autonomy the Serbian education, science, art and the entire spiritual life of Serbs, whose origins are related specifically to Kosovo and Metohija.

In this article, the author analyzes the terms for ‘woodpecker’ in the dialects of the Slavic languages, using the materials of the General Slavic Linguistic Atlas (OLA). The analysis contains two parts: the fi rst refers to the geographical distribution of the terms for ‘woodpecker’ in the Slavic-speaking area according to the stations covered by the OLA – about 850 settlements in the Slavic-speaking territory; the second part includes etymological and semantic analysis of the individual terms. From the analysis, it can be concluded that there is a great lexical diversity of these terms in the dialects of the Slavic languages, although the term dětьlъ is dominant in the Slavic-speaking area. Lexical diversity largely depended on the surrounding. Other factors, such as the contacts with other linguistic populations, infl uenced too. Recognizing the origin of the individual terms, we can establish that the forms are most often processed by onomatopoeia. But apart from the audacious perception, the motives for naming the woodpecker arose from the visual perception – the color of the feather, as well as the abilities characteristic of this kind of bird.

The text discusses words occurring in the Polish-East Slavic borderlands and prevalent in eastern Polish dialects. Differntiation between old references and loans in this area is not always easy. The material presented here is very diverse. In the case of certain words, identifying them as East Slavic loans with an indisputable source is possible, while in the case of others it is difficult to identify the direct source of the loan. Among the words recorded in the East Slavic borderlands we can find those whose range in Polish dialects seems to indicate the possibility of Ruthenian influence; however, their Polish phonetic form implies their native origin and one should speak about an old reference in this respect. We also encounter Pan-Slavic words, where a doubt arises as to whether they are loans or old references in Polish in the East Slavic area and Eastern Poland.

The article contains basic information about the recently identified Polish-Albanian glossary, and presents its content in an accessible form.

There are more than 350 fl owing waters in Poland with names containing a colour adjective. Etymological propositions mention sometimes various physical attributes such as the colour of the water or of the bottom, or even a possible symbolical usage connected e.g. with the cardinal directions, but most often they limit themselves to citing the literary version of the adjective, and there end their inquiry. The goal of the present paper is to establish to what degree physical attributes can explain the use of colour epithets; and if they cannot, then whether there is any reason to believe that there existed in the past a more elaborate system of colour symbolism.

The author defends the thesis that the dative case relation in Indo-European languages represents the second man – participant of the act of the linguistic communication, i.e. the addressee of the information (and the factual consequences of the information) sent by the fi rst man – participant and initiator of the act. Arguments documenting her thesis derive from her analysis of the pronominal systems of Polish and Macedonian as represents of Slavic languages on the one hand and French and English as represents of West European languages.

The author presents the thesis that the referent of the dative noun phrase is ‘a second human participant’ of the event ‒ referent of the proposition in question. The same applies to the referent of the genitive noun phrase. The two constructions differ only in their syntactic distribution ‒ dative is an adverbal case, while genetive is adnominal, which is the result of their semantic roles ‒ ‘recipient’ for dative and ‘possessor’ for genetive.

A subject of the paper Substantive Declension in Slavic Linguistic Atlas is based on an extensive field research of the Dialects of all Slavic languages. The territory of the research is delimited by the international Slavistic project Slavic Linguistic Atlas the database of which is formed by answers to 3400 questions within 853 localities of the overall Slavic territory. However, not all the forms of all the substantive paradigms are presented, but only the selected representative phenomena testifying to the natural constitutive processes of the national languages in connection with the phonetic changes proving the specifi c character of the linguistic development under the infl uence of a genetically homogeneous or heterogeneous environment and testifying to linguistic changes as results of intercultural, interlingual and probably also inter-confessional infl uences. The final part of the publication is oriented upon the constitutive processes of substantive declination in the Slavic macro-areas (South-Slavic, West-Slavic, and East-Slavic – and within them also in the particular Slavic languages) from the point of view of “otherness” and “foreignness”, i.e. from the point of view of the original and non-original grammatical endings in the particular declension types. The genuine basis of the transgression from the original domestic elements to the new ones gets manifested not only within the adaptation processes of the lexical level, but its basis is hidden in the long-term stabilization processes, in systemic changes by which the inner structure of the language, the area of the distribution of changes, and their impact upon the typological substance of the language are modified. By its interpretative character, the paper The Interpretation of Substantive Declension in Slavic Languages aims at integrating the genetic, areal as well as typological aspects of the investigated domain.

The author reviews the latest book by Leszek Bednarczuk devoted to the beginnings and the borderlands of the Polish language. The book under review deals with a wide array of topics related to the prehistory and history of Polish taken in its relation to Indo-European and the neighboring languages, the borderland varieties of Polish, and the linguistic vicissitudes of the Christianization of Poland.

The Serbian Language as Viewed by the East and the West: Synchrony, Diachrony, and Typology, edited by Ljudmila Popović and Motoki Nomachi is a collection of papers which were originally presented at the symposium on February 5th in 2014 at the Slavic-Euroasian Research Center of Hokkaido University. The authors analyze various examples of language contact and linguistic change in the history of the Serbian language with special attention to the cultural opposition of the East and West. In the last section, the results of contrastive analyses of Serbian and Japanese, Russian as well as other Slavic languages are presented. With regard to the topics discussed and high quality of all the studies (most authors are renowned linguists) the volume has a big value for contemporary Slavic linguistics.

The review covers Ruselina Nicolova’s The Bulgarian Grammar. This is a revised version of Bǔlgarska gramatika. Morfologiia (Sofiia 2008) edited in English by Frank & Timme (Berlin 2017). This outstanding achievement is appraised highly by the review author. The review compares the new work with an earlier academic morphology of Bulgarian (Gramatika na sǔvremenniia bǔlgarski knižoven ezik, t. 2: Morfologiia, Sofiia 1983). It concludes that the Grammar of R. Nicolova makes important progress in semantically and functionally oriented type of Bulgarian linguistic description as well as that publication of this study translated to English is important because it provides a widened reception of the work.

The subject of this review article is the monograph of the academician Zuzanna Topolińska Polski ~ macedoński: konfrontacja (nie tylko) gramatyczna. 10: Spirala ewolucji (Wrocław: Wrocławskie Towarzystwo Naukowe, 2015), dedicated to the history and typology of Polish, Macedonian and other Slavic languages, refl ecting the many years of fruitful experience of Zuzanna Topolińska in research in this area, as well as in linguistic theory. The author of the review article emphasizes the novelty of this monograph, and the relevance of the issues considered in it, as well as the great importance of the book for Slavic and General linguistics.

The article informs about the content of the publication on the Macedonian dialects used in Albania, in the Golo Brdo region.

Pavol Żigo’s work, which opens the development of morphological maps in the OLA team, is worthy of the highest praise. It offers an interpretation of selected maps concerning declination of nouns, accompanied by detailed theoretical considerations of the process of changes in the declination system in Slavic languages. Drawing on extensive dialectal records, the Atlas offers an excellent overview of the complex development of declination of nouns in Slavic languages. This publication may serve as a model for further studies in this field.

The review is devoted to the monograph of the Slovak professor P. Žigo Evolution of Noun Declension in the Slavic Languages. The author appreciates the monograph and considers it as theoretical breakthrough in historical and areal linguistics, as it offers new methodology of the way we read and interpret the linguistic maps of Slavic Linguistic Atlas. The Monograph based on the unique materials of the Slavic Linguistic Atlas, free from previous atomicity and arbitrariness in linguistic research, largely clarifi es the complex picture of connections and relations of the Slavic languages, which have changed often in their long history.