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.

The article offers an insight into the Slavonic contemporary etymological research and its new possibilities. Modern etymology has witnessed a seachange that can be referred to as a digital breakthrough. Thanks to the Internet and electronic media the etymologists today have easier access to historicallinguistic, dialectal and onomastic sources as well as to etymological dictionaries. They also better access to many monographs and studies. Moreover, today the etymologist has no problems making use of analogous materials published in foreign languages, the obtaining of which in the past had posed a major problem. This will clearly accelerate progress in etymological research, thereby opening up new vistas for etymology. We can research effectively the origins of dialectal and colloquial words as well as words no longer in use, a task which had earlier been very difficult.

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.

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.

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)’.

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 article is a contribution to the study of the history of the lexis of the Proto- -Slavic language. The etymological analysis of anatomical lexis presented in this article allows us to establish several chronological layers of the lexis: lexemes inherited from the Indo-European proto-language, lexemes from the Baltic and Slavic language communities, lexemes created from Indo-European bases, and lexemes created from Proto-Slavic bases, which are late innovations of the Proto- -Slavic language. Each stage of the history of the Proto-Slavic lexis is documented with appropriate material. In this way this study advances research on the development of Proto-Slavic historical lexicology.

Two types of names for ‘Turkish delight’ are known in the Slavic languages: rahat-lokum ~ ratluk, and lokum. Even though most etymological dictionaries derive them from the same Arabo-Turkish etymon, their different structures are not discussed and the phonetic differences not explained. The aim of this paper is to establish the relative chronology of changes made to the original phrase, as well as to point out some problems which still remain more or less obscure.

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.

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.

This article analyzes the common Slavic linguistic atlas maps (OLA). Assessing the preliminary results of the OLA project, the author focused her attention on the new linguistic geography data given in the Atlas, and the evolution of some units and Proto-Slavic dialect differentiation of Slavia.

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.