The Old Believers appeared on the Polish territories in 18th century. They are a bilingual community. They use Russian dialect and Polish language, depending on communicative situation. Polish influence on the Old Believers’ dialect increased after two World Wars, when they became separated from their co-religionists in other countries and had more often contacts with Polish neighbours. In Old Believers’ Russian dialect more and more Polish elements are noticable, especially in lexis. In the technical terminology there are a lot of borrowings from Polish language caused above all by the civilization progress. The aim of this article is to analyze the lexis borrowed from Polish language in the field of technics in Russian dialect of the Old Believers of Suwałki-Augustów Region and furthermore confront it with the material gathered in “Słownik gwary staroobrzędowców mieszkających w Polsce” (1980 a.d.). The gathered material was analyzed paying special attention to assimilation to the Russian dialect.

The hydronym Szywra refers to the small river in the Warta basin flowing in the central part of Greater Poland. Although its name remained unclear for most of the researchers, it was believed to be of Pre-Slavic or Balto-Slavic origin. The paper reveals that these hypotheses were based on the wrong interpretation of the source material, and provides a new etymology for the name Szywra. Based on the critical analysis of all of the reachable records of names referring to the river Szywra, it has been proven that its Polish name is an adaptation of the former German name Schieferbach. Such a process was possible due to the long-term bilingual situation in the region of Greater Poland.

This paper is devoted to the surname changes performed through administrative channels in the interwar period. The research is based on the announcements of the “Official Gazette of the Republic of Poland” in 1929. The author describes main reasons for the decisions of surname changes taking into account characteristics of avoided surnames and chosen demographic tendencies, especially those connected with the age and profession of applicants. People of Jewish origin, Poles and representatives of other nationalities showed different motives for surname changes. Jews most frequently changed their surnames due to legal reasons — they wanted to legalize the unlawful use of a surname of the so-called ritual father. The changes carried out under the motive of assimilation occurred definitely less often. Non-Jewish applicants changed mainly appellative names, especially those derived from words related to animals. After comparing tendencies occurring before and after World War II one concludes that besides legal and assimilation factors which are particular to the pre-war decades (connected with the ethnic, legal and religious situation of the time), the remaining reasons for the surname changes are universal and do not distinguish the pre-war period from that of the post-war.

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.

We talk about technology, lexicography, and long-forgotten word senses in Polish with Prof. Włodzimierz Gruszczyński from the PAS Institute of the Polish Language, where work is underway on the Electronic Dictionary of the Polish Language of the 17th and 18th Centuries.

The component of the cause for the emotional state of the person experiencing the emotion is built into the structure of the class of verba sentiendi. Most emotive verbs can be classed as P(x, q) predicates, where q is the position of the propositional argument in which the content qualifying the causal component is expressed. The syntactic characteristics of sentences (conjunctions, prepositions) often do not communicate unequivocally the causal function. This paper demonstrates the existence in languages of contextual syntactic conditions which foster the use of explicit exponents of causality (e.g., Pol. ponieważ / bo // z powodu; Bulg. защото / понеже // поради / заради / по повод), appearing in alteration with the exponents of cohesion typical of the given verb. Also brought to attention is the use in sentence structures of other lexical means serving a similar function, like Pol. wynikający / płynący; Bulg. причинен / предизвикан. In conclusion it is stated that the research which takes into account the semantic structure of the predicate allows for analyzing phenomena that are usually not included in descriptions of case government of verbs.

Prasa żydowska w języku polskim w Galicji w latach 1870–1918 tworzona była przez środowiska skupione wokół określonych ideologii politycznych. Największą rolę na polu wydawnictw prasowych odgrywali zwolennicy haseł syjonizmu, czego przykładem są „Przyszłość”, „Wschód”, „Moriah”. Drugą grupę tworzyli asymilatorzy, skupieni wokół lwowskich tytułów — „Jedność”, „Zjednoczenie”. Własne trybuny posiadały ugrupowania o poglądach socjalistycznych i Stronnictwo Niezależnych Żydów. Głównymi ośrodkami wydawniczymi były Lwów i Kraków. Większość żydowskich periodyków w języku polskim cechowała efemeryczność. Artykuł przynosi przegląd tytułów prasy żydowskiej w języku polskim wydawanej w Galicji w latach 1870–1918. Charakterystyki pism żydowskich w języku polskim dokonano na tle galicyjskiej prasy żydowskiej ukazującej się w języku jidysz, hebrajskim, niemieckim i innych.

This article researches the debatable issue in semasiology, particularly the origin of an idiom captured in four Slavic languages: Ukrainian zbyty z pantelyku, Russian sbit’ s pantalyku, Belarusian zbits’ z pantalyku, Polish zbić z pantałyku. The subject of analysis is fictional texts and lexicographical sources in which this phraseological unit first appeared. All etymological hypotheses developed by language experts during 19th-20th centuries were dedicated to the explanation of the word «pantelyk». The difficulty of revealing the figurative basis of the expression is due to the fact that this keyword does not belong to the Slavic vocabulary. This circumstance made it complicated to explain how the term «pantelyk» influenced the original figurative meaning of the idiom «seduce out of the right way». The new etymological version, offered by the article’s author, is that the idiom zbyty z pantelyku can be reconstructed as a semantic chain: throw off a course → seduce out of the right way → to throw into confusion → zbyty z pantelyku. The word «pantelyk», which wasn’t a part of any dialect, is a nonce formation or an occasional expression that emerged as a result of a burlesque travesty genre in the poem Eneyida by Ivan Kotlyarevsky.

Nowadays, the Polish Old Believers live in a language island. Language islands are detached from their ethnolinguistic roots and suffer a constant shortage of language structures. On the one hand, they acquire the language of the dominant group; on the other hand, it is important for them to preserve the language of their ancestors. The Old Believers’ Russian dialect has been influenced by the Polish language for over a century. As a result of the territorial proximity of the Old Believers’ homeland with the compact Belarusian language territory as well as exposure to Belarusian language and its dialects, “Polish” Old Believers’ speech bears many features characteristic for them. The main aim of this paper is to present the prepositions of space in the local dialect of Old Believers in Poland and to describe their characteristics. The “Polish” Old Believers’ narratives investigated in this paper contain many examples of use of the prepositions of space typical for their indigenous dialects as well as the Belarusian language and dialects. There are also many examples of use of such prepositions that can be considered as a result of Polish influence on the Russian dialect of Old Believers living in Poland.

The article is devoted to the problem of language interaction in Polish and East Slavic languages phraseology. Polish had a signifi cant impact on the formation of the phraseology of the East Slavic languages of the late XVI – early XIX century, which led to the emergence of similar Polish-Ukrainian-Belarusian-Russian phraseological units. It is often very difficult to determine the donor language. In some cases, the idiom (or proverb) could migrate from one language to another, enriching itself with new elements (in terms of vocabulary or semantics) and returning to the donor language in a new capacity. In the search for the source of phraseology in the article the authors propose to consider the date of the earliest fixation of the unit, the extended context of its use, which may contain linguistic or ethnographic details that help to identify the donor language. The article investigates the origin of one of the most obscure and recalcitrant items in Slavic phraseology: Polish zbić z pantałyku, Belorussian збіць з панталыку, Ukrainian збити з пантелику and Russian сбить с панталыку. In all four languages the meaning is ‘to confuse, befuddle, baffle’. This phraseological expression is shown to be first attested in Ukrainian at the end of the 18th cent.; from Ukrainian it was borrowed into Russian and then migrated into Polish. It is proposed that the expression originated in Ukrainian vernacular on the basis of Polish loanword pontalik ‘ornament, jewel’ adopted in Ukrainian as пантелик.