In the first part of this article the author suggests a new etymology for the East Slavic adjective horošiĭ ʻgoodʼ (in Old Russian ʻbeautifulʼ) – from IE *ker(ə)- ʻburn, blazeʼ extended by the determinative -s-: richly attested *kor-s- > Proto Slavonic *xor-x- (> *xoršьjь) with the affective x-, like many other words. As proposed by many scholars, one of the variants of this root is present in Slavonic *krasa ʻbeautyʼ that corresponds to the original meaning of the adjective horošiĭ. The determinative -s- is commonly used for extending the root *ker(ə)-. The second part deals with three proper names in the (Old) Russian mythology and folklore that come, in the author’s opinion, from Iranic languages. The analysis of the early Old Russian written sources (The Ostromir’s Gospel and chronicles) allows to approve that the original form of the theonym Xors was Xorŭsŭ coming from the genitive form of the Iranian word for ‘sun’ in the truncated compound name (most likely, ‘son of the sun’ as a name of the deity of sunrise). The name of the tale bird Mogoveĭ/Magoveĭ corresponds to Avestan (Gath.) magavan-, adj. ‘belonging to the Zoroastrian community’, Old Indic maghá-van(t)- ‘generous; giver (also an epithet of Indra)’, Old Persian magav-, an adjective denoting a Median tribe whose representatives had got the rank of priests, ‘magic, magician’, Pāli maghavā, the name of Sakka. This name corresponds to another fairy bird name recorded on the same territory (in the basin of the Mezen, the region of Archangelsk) ‒ Vostrogot (Vostrogor) that continues Young Avestan a-srāvayaT.gāθā ‘not chanting the Gathas’; i.e., these two mythonyms form an opposition based on the semantic feature ‘initiated ‒ uninitiated (into the Zoroastrian doctrine and ritual)’.

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.

The discussed and reviewed book may be considered not merely a collection of word studies, but also a monograph dealing with lexical language contacts in the Polish-Eastern Slavic linguistic borderland. The authors examine more than 30 dialect words against the background of imposing Polish and East Slavic linguistic material, utilise the extensive subject literature, and apply modern dialectological research and language contact theory methods. Their main academic achievements include a precise delineation of the extent of East Slavic lexical borrowings in Polish dialect and a convincing verification of the criteria used to determine them. These efforts also allowed them to discover relict Polish-East Slavic references, previously considered borrowings from Ruthenian languages, in the examined lexical material. The publication, due to its advantages in material, theory and methodology, should serve as a model of research on dialectal linguistic borderlands for Slavic language studies. I believe that the book of Dorota Krystyna Rembiszewska and Janusz Siatkowski should deserves to be rated highly.

As in the first part I (Warsaw 2018) the main research goal of the authors is distinguishing East Slavic borrowings from Polish archaisms. These units could be explained as a parallel, convergence, or Polish and Ruthenian neologisms in the Polish language area as a consequence of interference. The detailed and comprehensive analysis considering geographic, chronological and etymological aspects of the selected lexical items, allowed the authors to establish the provenance of the researched vocabulary in a precise and reliable way. The paper is exemplary both in terms of content and applied methodology.

The article deals with the question of linguistic interference among Slavic languages at the example of Choroszczynka, a bilingual village in Biała Podlaska County, Lublin Voivodeship. The presentation of two complete questionnaires for the Slavic Linguistic Atlas (OLA), Polish and Ukrainian, not only makes it possible to capture grammatical and lexical peculiarities of both sets assigned to individual dialects, but also reveals carelessness of the fi eldworkers who collected the data. This, in turn, contributed to such an interpretation of dialectal data presented in OLA maps which does not refl ect linguistic reality.

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.