The authors analyze the new book The place of the Macedonian phonetics within the Slavic and Balkan linguistic area from Irena Sawicka and Anna Cychnerska. The book is trying to shed new light on the place of Macedonian phonetics regarding its Slavic heritage and also regarding the contact changes that appeared during development of the Macedonian language in the Balkan linguistic league. Their research is conducted on Macedonian dialects represented in Common linguistic atlas (OLA) and in Phonological bases of the Macedonian dialects from B. Vidoeski. In their book, Sawicka and Cychnerska state that they use diachronic data, but their main goal is to present selected synchronic features from the Macedonian phonetics. They explain most of the phonetic features in Macedonian from an areal-typological aspect with special emphasis on the Balkan convergences. The authors of the book state that the Macedonian phonetic should be included in southwest type of Slavic phonetics. They conclude that the modern form of Macedonian phonetic, to large extent, was influenced by areal position of the Macedonian language and to its development in the Balkan multilingual territory.

The origin of Proto-Slavic palatal(ized) consonants has interested many linguists. Some of them have tried to connect palatality and velarity of Slavic consonants with the influence of Turkic consonant palatalization or velarization dependent on vowel harmony. This paper is a first study allowing for Turkological point of view and striving to show that there still are many doubts about the Proto- -Turkic influence on Proto-Slavic.

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

A newly published monograph by Vladimir Cvetkovski (Cvetkovski 2017) has given rise to a short examination of some Turkish loanwords in Bitola Macedonian, partially in comparison with the classic treatment of the topic presented by Olivera Jašar-Nasteva a few years ago (Ja{ar-Nasteva 2001). Besides, some methodological remarks and, fi rst of all, a rule concerning treatment of sonorants in assimilation processes in Macedonian (see bilbil) are suggested in the study.

The paper presents an analysis of the voicing of the phoneme /v/ in modern spoken Macedonian. The phoneme /v/ in the standard Macedonian language is classifi ed as a fricative, but some of its characteristics separate it from the other phonemes in this group. This is due to the fact that this phoneme was once a sonorant. In a part of the Macedonian dialects this phoneme is pronounced with marked voicing to this day. This phenomenon is then refl ected in the pronunciation of standard Macedonian. Our analysis is based on a selected corpus of examples that have been spoken by speakers from various dialect origins, in order to assess the any differences in pronouncing of the phoneme /v/ when placed in different phoneme contexts in the word.

This paper analyses the question from the Lexical volume 9 – “Man” of the General Slavic Linguistic Atlas (OLA). It is about the terms for the ‘footprint, track’ (‘stapalka, traga’ in Macedonian) in the Slavic dialects covered by the question L 1575 (‘след стопы’) according to the Questionnaire of OLA. The aim of the analysis is to show the geographical distribution, etymology and semantic motivation for the terms of ‘footprint, track’ in Macedonian dialects (which are based on the material from the OLA) in correlation with the equivalents on the Slavic linguistic territory.

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.

This publication begins a series of works devoted to the analysis of the semantic derivation of selected Proto-Slavic roots in Macedonian and Polish. The aim of this work is to capture the parallels and differences in the evolution of the two confronted – though rather distant – languages. We obtain Macedonian and Polish visualizations of the world.

The author supports the thesis that the semantic derivation presents the basic mechanism enriching our lexical resources.

The use of Church Slavonic texts as resources for the study of the history of Macedonian language requires a serious deep level analysis in order to defi ne the structure of the Church Slavonic language system on all its level. The structure of the literary language can be differentiated in several types of features: specifi c literary features unknown in the dialectal language; hybrid features, i.e. features based on dialectal grounds but developed in Old Slavonic in a specifi c way; dialectal features of various origins, differentiated chronologically or locally. The Macedonian Recension of the Church Slavonic language from its gradual beginning during the 11th century, especially in the second half, reaches its full development in the 12th century, when there is a consolidation of the basic norms of the Macedonian Church Slavonic literacy. The consolidation of these norms is connected and in continuity with the Old Slavonic Glagolitic period in the work of the Ohrid literary center. The paper presents representative examples that characterize the language of the Macedonian Old Church Slavonic literacy on orthographic, phonological, morpho-syntactic and lexical level.

In the Balkans, the Serbo-Macedonian Unit (SMU), Serbia, is thrust bounded by the composite Tethyan Vardar Zone and the Carpatho-Balkanides. The SMU actually emerges from beneath the Neoalpine Miocene–Pliocene deposits. Both provenance and geodynamic position of the SMU are poorly known and still debated. This paper reviews the data hitherto published and includes some new field data interpretations. The SMU is composed of a Neoproterozoic–Cambrian high-grade (para- and ortho-) gneiss with peraluminous magmatic arc components (560–470 Ma). The SMU is in the contact with Neoproterozoic upper Ordovician–Carboniferous low-grade metasedimentary succession of an accretionary wedge assembly represented by the Supragetic basement. The SMU basement became folded, sheared and metamorphosed around 490–450 Ma. Paleomagnetic data point to high southern latitudes and a peri-Gondwanan position of the SMU at that time, which concurs with glaciomarine evidence recorded from the upper Ordovician sediments at the base of an accretionary wedge succession. Based on the published data and field survey in the Stalać region, we correlate the SMU with the pre-Mesozoic gneiss terrane exposed in the Strona-Ceneri zone of the Alps. This terrane, identified as the Cenerian orogen of the Alaskan subduction type, developed at an active margin of Gondwana during middle Ordovician times. The SMU basement, with augen and migmatitic gneisses and arc-related peraluminous magmatic bodies, developed at this margin as part of the Cenerian belt or its equivalent. Such an orogenic edifice proved transient and in the earliest Silurian the SMU fragments drifted away being bound for Baltica (amalgamated Moesian microplate and Danubian terrane) to which they became accreted in the Carboniferous and included in the southern European branch of the Variscan orogen (Marginal Dacides/Carpatho-Balkanides). Despite considerable Variscan and Alpine reworking, the pre-Variscan, Cenerian-type crustal assembly along with an inferred boundary between the magmatic arc and the accretionary wedge, accompanied by back-arc/forearc deposits, are still decipherable in the Western Balkan countries.

In Memoriam Professor Włodzimierz Pianka, prominent linguist, distinguished scholar in Slavic, Macedonian and Sorbian languages and in onomastics (with particular focus on the Balkan area), expert in Slavic confrontative grammar, professor at the Universities of Warsaw and Vienna, honorary doctor at the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, member of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts. The paper outlines and profiles the late Professor’s life and work as well as research interests along with selected publications.

In the recent years the employees of the Research Center for Areal Linguistics at the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts have been working on a new approach for the description of the word formation system in the Macedonian language. The approach consists of researching groups of lexemes derived from the same root attested in the Proto‑Slavic language. According to Markovikj and Topolińska (2019), one of the most important processes that present the systematic transfer of information from the semantic continuum to the lexicon of the language is the semantic derivation. This process allows the observation of the associative sequences, which retain the basic, initial semantic components, transmitted from the man and from the real physical world to the human mental world. In this paper, the author analyzes the formal and the semantic derivation of the Proto‑Slavic root * gor‑ in the Macedonian language, which has developed several variations since the Proto‑Slavic period. The analysis of the initial semantics of the word forms derived from the root * gor‑ and its variations, showed that they all share a common semantic concept ‘covered by fire’, which refers to the inseparable relationship between man and nature.

The article discusses the book Zmiana perspektywy. Gawęda nie tylko językoznawcza [Change of perspective. More than a tale of linguistics] by Zuzanna Topolińska (Cracow 2015). The author of this text emphasizes that the word gawęda [tale] in the book’s subtitle is misleading, given that, despite the style of language used in the book, Topolińska discusses important issues of a linguistic and intercultural nature. In her short essays in the fi rst part of the book Topolińska addresses the organizational structure of philology studies in Poland and Macedonia, she confronts the Polish and Macedonian approach to the dialectgeneral language relationship, she talks about language standards, about the differences between politeness in Poland and Macedonia, as well as the attitude towards women and the outlook toward religion in both countries. In the second part of the book Topolińska takes up lexical issues, giving examples of how under the infl uence of spiritual culture certain words in Polish and Macedonian that derive from the same core have taken on a different meaning. The author of the article concludes that this short and very personal book by Topolińska fulfi lls its task and subsequently alters his view on the linguistic and non-linguistic world of the Slavs.