The lack of a comprehensive etymological dictionary of the best documented and, in many accounts, main Semitic language, i.e., Arabic, is a serious drawback for progress in our knowledge of the background and evolution of lexical studies of the whole Afrasian phylum. Any serious attempt at achieving that goal would require a team of a number of scholars working hard during several years; however, in the meantime, a modest shortcut could be to consecrate some personal efforts in that direction on a single important Arabic dialect, and this is what we are presently trying to bring about, within the project of a linguistic encyclopaedia of Andalusi Arabic. So far, our endeavours have cast some new lights of lexical borrowing not only from well-known cases of Aramean and Persian origins, but also, e.g., from Akkadian and Old Egyptian, as well as a rather detailed account of phonetic changes and lexical composition scarcely detected or never heretofore suspected and having often prevented the recognition of the true etyma of Semitic and non-Semitic stock, of which the present article is, of course, only a résumé and introduction.

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.