The Epistle of Barnabas, usually included in the works of the Apostolic Fathers, is an anonymous text written in koiné Greek. It was probably composed between the end of the First and the beginning of the Second Century in an Egyptian or Syro-Palestinian setting. The text is made up of two parts: the first one has an anti-Judaic apologetic nature; the second one is instructive and paraenetical. The Latin version of the Epistle (L), which is useful in the constitutio textus of the original too, concerns the first of the two parts. An analysis of the language and of the technique of translation allows asserting that L was probably compiled in Rome between the end of the Second and the beginning of the Third Century. Moreover, its main features may be identified in the literality and in the linguistic and stylistic popularity. The literality is both quantitative and distributional: the changes are usually narrow (except expressions which introduce Biblical quotations) and concern parts which may be considered accessory by a semantic point of view. The popular style is due to the attention the translator pays to the needs of the sociocultural situation of the readers and is confirmed by the presence of rhetorical figures as alliteration. These two characteristics, which are typical of Latin translations of Greek Patristic texts compiled between the end of the Second and the beginning of the Third Century, are due to stylistic choices which are homogeneously and congruently applied. Moreover, in L these characteristics are strictly bound, because the sermo humilis characterizes the Greek text too.

Can local dialects and vernaculars carve out a future for themselves in today’s world?

The article investigates the level of language awareness manifested by the advanced learners of Polish as a FL (146 students of the Polish Language Course attending the School of Polish Language and Culture at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland). The exact focus is on learning outcomes (areas of language progress and regress), and perception of the Polish language material learnt (including grammar, vocabulary and phonology), an emphasis being put on most problematic issues. Having presented learners’ opinions and reflections on language, implications for teachers including teaching materials raising language awareness are offered.

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.

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 paper is aimed at presentation and analysis of different approaches to the phenomenon of "feeling for language". The purpose is to demonstrate that this term, although controversial, is of great importance in language acquisition and in the evaluation of language expressions. The topic is discussed in the article with the help of definitions from Kainz, Knobloch, Lewandowski, Juhász, Olt/Disselkamp, and Trad. In the definitions, various facets of language feeling are taken up, such as its relation to intuition, reference to mother tongue and foreign language and individual or collective implications.

On the past and future of the Upper Sorbian minority language in Germany.

Common spoken and written Polish (literary language) belongs to the European languages which have been sufficiently influenced by biblical writings (language). Relationships between literary language and the language of the biblical translations can be described as mutual influence of various intensity as far as the direction, time, intensification, endurance and level of the language are concerned. The article deals with the examples of the influence of the biblical translations on the literary language as for its intellectualisation, lexical and phraseological enrichment as well as stylistic development.

In the article the author discusses the practice associated with name-giving among the residents of Łódź (only Catholics of Polish origin) during the period from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the first half of the nineteenth century. The material was collected from official documents. Habits associated with the first names were treated as a kind of linguistic behaviour that implements a specific communication need of the given community. Observations of these habits show that they oscillate — like any linguistic behaviour — between automatism (and convention) and spontaneity. Conventional measures that should be considered: the use of a limited collection of names that indicate a high degree of stability in subsequent periods and against the background of habits of name-giving in the region and other territories of the former Poland (especially the most popular names of women, e.g. Marianna, Katarzyna, Agnieszka and names of men, e.g. Józef, Jan, Franciszek) and inheritance of names. In contrast, a large number of rare names (names of women, e.g. Idalia, Jokasta, Kasylda, and of men, e.g. Bonawentura, Wit, Witalis) and a visible preference in some families for the usage of rare names, e.g. Damazy, Feliks, Lubomira (including Slavic first names, e.g. Bolesław, Władysław, Bronisław) were included as spontaneous factors. Analysis of the material reveals a tendency to differentiate names depending on the social status of the inhabitants (the representatives of the noble families often used rare names). The author also draws attention to the problem of the diversity of names in Łódź (both in the context of different collections of names and different practices) depending on parameters such as the religion (Catholics, Protestants, Jews) and nationality (Poles, Germans, Czechs) of residents of the city.

Asst. Prof. Piotr Osęka from the PAS Institute of Political Studies explains what groups are being depicted as enemies in the eyes of the Poles and what purposes such propaganda serves.

Polish has been influenced by other languages in a variety of ways – bringing in not only new words but also syntactic borrowings. Syntactic calques from English, increasingly common in recent years, often lead to unnatural-sounding or unnecessarily complex sentence structures in Polish.

Dr. Michał Németh of the Jagiellonian University explains how a peek inside someone’s closets can help stop a culture from disappearing and how altruism can facilitate the development of a niche branch of science.

The risks of deceptive inferences and of inaccurate language production by foreign learners of Italian who know one or more Romance languages have not yet been sufficiently considered from the perspective of intercomprehension. Based on texts written by students with Czech as their mother tongue, in this article I will analyze in which ways this type of interference can emerge and propose some solutions to be applied.

This article deals with the etymology of three Polish words: przyzwoity, wyśmienity and rubaszny. All three should probably be considered native formations. Przyzwoity (in the older version przywoity, also przyzwoisty) in genetic terms should probably be combined with the verb wić: *przy‑wić > * przy‑wój > * prz‑woj‑ity. Wyśmienity – according to A. Brückner's hypothesis – derives from the hypothetical preform of pol. * wyśmień ‘height’. Rubaszny, on the other hand, is also the result of native derivational processes and derives from the Polish adjective gruby in the sense of undelicate, simple, unsophisticated, uncouth, coarse, rude’: * (g)ruby > * (g)rubacha > * (g)rubaszny.

The author states that a “biography” of a language presents de facto its capability to adapt to natural and/or man‑made changes in the environment of the community speaking the language in question.

The article opens a series of etymological research deal with selected lexical units with not clear etymology in the Polish language. Two lexemes - berek and zbereźnik are analysed in this paper. The first of them could be borrowed from Hebrew or may have an etymological connection with the verb brać. The second one, due to the phonetic feature (pleophony -ere-), probably comes from the Ukrainian language (cf. in Hutsul culture beréza means a main figure among carollers; the staroste (master of ceremonies) at the wedding’).

The author states that the language functions in the service to the thought; it organizes the course of our thought and enables transfer of information. To attain this purpose, it has two mechanisms at its disposal: 1. lexicalisation, which enables us to give form to the results of our conceptualisation of the world, and 2. grammaticalization, which ensures that the information most important to the successful course of the linguistic communication gets regular transparent surface categorial markers (= markers of the so‑called grammatical categories). She discusses parallels and differences in the functioning of these two mechanisms in Polish and in Macedonian.

The paper presents the most overall project of Hungarian dialectology of the past few decades and deals with the partial result of its sociolinguistic survey. The interviews analysed were recorded in Western Hungary as part of the New General Atlas of Hungarian Dialects project between 2007 and 2012. The project, funded by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and organized by the Geolinguistics Research Group of the Eötvös Loránd University, asked the participants about sociolinguistic issues at several data collection sites in the Hungarian language area, in addition to surveying dialectological phenomena. For example: Do you speak dialects here in this town? Do they speak better here than in the neighboring settlements? Do you speak in the same way in a city or official place as at home, in a family circle? Have you ever been mocked because of your dialect speech? Given that tens of thousands of hours of the recordings have not yet been processed in a systematic and comprehensive way, the first half of the study provides numerical and detailed data on how the planned program of the research group was realized in practice regarding, for the time being, the Western Hungarian data collection sites. The second half of the study presents partial results on the language and dialect awareness, attitudes and use of the respondents by analysing the sociolinguistic interviews recorded in this area. The study provides a more accurate description of the specifics in the archive of the New General Atlas of Hungarian Dialects project, as well as what the recorded data reveal on the linguistic mentality of the Western Hungarian speech community in the beginning of the 21st century. This is just one of the numerous research topics offered by the enormous archive.

The article summarizes the results of sociolinguistic study of the language environment of secondary schools in Ukraine, on the basis of which the conclusion about its bilingualism was made. It is proved that the quality of the language environment does not correspond to the declared school status. Changes in the assessment of the language environment of schools from 2006 to 2017 are identified and it is concluded that it is possible to develop recommendations for improving the legal support of the use of languages in the Ukrainian education.

The health emergency, caused by viruses SARS-CoV-2, has been a major challenge for the teaching of foreign languages and Italian. This essay investigates the main criticalities of distance learning by a representative sample of teachers, in the first phase of the health emergency.

The article examines the language biographies of two generations of a family of German origin in the Czech Republic from the end of World War II to the present day. The content analysis of the biographies is based on the application of the narrative interview method developed in qualitative sociology. The analysis of the data obtained by this method follows the stages in the language use of the two informants in coping with the challenge of the language policies of the state.

Which lexical typology does the Italian language have? A comparative study with French – This paper sets out to show the lexical and typological differences between the French and Italian languages. French is the only Romance language without morphology in words. Italian continues to build words while including morphology. This phenomenon can be explained by the diacronic process of deflexivity, which is more advanced in French. The consequence is that French words are more compact and unanalyzable. French is becoming a “neoisolating” language.

Post-truth and parody in old and new media – This paper presents a description of a few issues of the satirical magazine Il Male, published in Italy in the second half of the 1970s. These special issues – somewhat parodies – copied the typographic format of the main Italian newspapers of that period and were filled with odd and invented news. In some respects these publications anticipate parody and falsification in the digital era. In particular, some Internet sites that play on the slight distinction between false and true reports, and make us reflect upon the reliability of the information, can be considered as heirs to this experiment.