Beikheim is the name of a vanished settlement in Upper Franconia (North East Ba¬varia). The article compares a (traditional) Slavic etymology with two German(ic) ones proposed recently in a 2015 ...Ph.D. thesis by J. Andraschke (published in 2016) and evaluates them. Although the Slavic one has the disadvantage of a somewhat unusual substitutional process CSlav. *y → OHG ī (instead of more common CSlav. *y → OHG ū, ǖ), it can be shown that the Slavic etymology is clearly to be favoured over the two German(ic) ones: †Beikheim goes back to a place-name CSlav. *Bykovъ, -a, -o *gordъ, *vьsь, *město, most probably feminine CSlav. *Bykova *vьsь ‘Byk’s village’.
J. Bleiweis’ newspaper Kmetijske in rokodelske novice (Agricultural and Artisanal News), also known simply as Novice (News), played a key role in the creation of a unified Standard Slovenian language ...by bringing together all Slovenian writers and providing readers with a means to learn about writing and encouraged the reading of Slovenian texts. The newspaper built on the sense of Slovenian affiliation and the idea of the United Slovenia by reinforcing the unified Standard Slovenian language and unified Slovenian writing called slovenica, rejecting the Illyrian movement and Pan-Slavicism, later somewhat less convincingly with the adoption of new forms that Bleiweis initially established as a defiance against “our pure” and “comprehensible” Slovenian language. Bleiweis’ efforts to establish the use of the Slovenian language in schools and public life made it possible for the Slovenian language to achieve four-part perfection regarding its functional varieties, i.e. expanding from its basic practical and communicative “home environment” to the public sphere, where it functioned easily in journalism, took on the fully-fledged role of a specialist language in the translation of Državni zakonik (the official collection of national rules and regulations) and that of an artistic language also used in Prešeren’s poems published in Novice. As a result of Bleiweis’ Novice, schools, newspapers, and books in Slovenia were able to gain public acclaim. Despite the editor maintaining that Novice was an “educational journal for a simple people”, it was in fact also a political newspaper that suited intellectuals; it was at the heart of the Slovenian national revival and, as such, opened a public discussion about all the important issues of Slovenism, particularly regarding language, culture, politics, and literature.
Most linguistic theories consider language essentially as a means of communication between ontological individuals. Society is nothing but a voluntary social grouping which happened at some point in ...the history of our species. Language is then considered a communication tool which helps us encode concepts for the benefit of other individuals and linguistics concentrates on the processes which allow this feat in the speakers’ brains. Intercomprehension is quite often explained in terms of genetic endowment. For example, Chomsky’s universal grammar explains syntax and semantic primes explain the construction of meaning. The hypothetical even metaphysical aspect of this point of view is quite often overlooked and language becomes a “code” which can be described in terms of logic and mathematics. And as thought precedes formulation, linguistic form and meaning are ontologically separated and this leads to the deeply ingrained mind/body dualism which lurches in the background of most theories. In this text, we aim to show that language is one of the three environments (« milieus ») in which we live, the two others being society and nature, both humanised by and through language and constantly altered by human activity. Three dimensions can be distinguished in language. The first and foremost is anthropological. People speak to create links between themselves and language is then the locus of small talk, human relations, education, politics, ethics, values, gossip, etc. Language is also used for collective work and action when it makes use of its referential dimension: many words refer to elements of our experience and language is then the locus of work, the economy and collective action. Finally, language is also the locus of personal thought, creativity and individualisation. Yet this cognitive dimension of language can only develop when the anthropological and referential dimensions have been acquired: it is not cause but consequence.Linguistic communities tend to fall back on themselves in what can be termed “ubuntus”, a Bantu word which names a community speaking a language within a culture. Becoming locked up inside ubuntus can be effectively avoided by language learning because languages open doors to others and allow for the offsetting of one’s own ubuntu. Multilingualism conditions knowledge and tolerance of the other.
Contemporary etymological research is largely aimed at rethinking hitherto offered etymological solutions, especially for words that do not have a generally accepted interpretation. One of those ...words is PSl *kovylъ / *kovylь ‘feather-grass, Stipa pennata’, whose continuants are attested mainly in Eastern and Southern Slavic languages: Ru. kovyľ, kovyl, Ukr. koviľ, kovila, Bel. kavyľ, Bulg. kovil, koil, kofil, Mac. kovil, kofil, SCr. kovilje, Sln. kovilje. The etymological literature has drawn attention to the potential connection of PSl *kovylъ / *kovylь with the verb *kovyľati (sę) ‘to swing, wobble, stagger’, even though this verb does not have a unanimously accepted interpretation either. This paper departs from the assumption that the phytonym and verb under consideration have a common origin, and that the prefix *ko- is distinguished in both forms. The verb is related to PSl *vьlati, vьlajǫ ‘to swing, swing on waves’, related to PSl *vьlna ‘wave’, *valiti (sę) ‘to roll’, and ultimately boils down to the IE root *ṷelH- ‘to roll’. As among the continuants and derivatives of the PSl verb *vьlati there is a variation of the reduced vowels (-ь- : -ъ-) at the root (cf. OCS vъlajati sę ‘to oscillate (about waves)’, etc.), forms with the vocalism -ъ- could serve as a basis for the occurrence of the secondary ablaut *vъl- / *vyl-. Thus, from the unconfirmed prefixed form *ko-vъlati sę (a form without the prefix *vъlati sę is reconstructed!), an intense / iterative *kovyl(j)ati sę could be created in the same meaning. The variance of -ati / -jati can be explained from the original *kovylati, koviljǫ (sę), with the subsequent spread of the palatal ľ from the present tense stem to the infinitive stem. This also explains the variation of the palatal and non-palatal l at the end of the stem of the deverbal noun *kovylъ / *kovylь.
This paper contains a description of the Bistriţa toponymic field: a set of names formed from the Bistriţa hydronym through structural processes called by Dragoş Moldovanu polarization and ...differentiation. In order to identify the core - the main element of the field from which the other toponyms have been formed-, it was necessary to clarify the etymology of the word Bistrita. At the origin of this place name is the Ukrainian bystrica, a derivative of the adjective bystr- “fast; crystal clear”. The meaning of this adjective must therefore be associated with a watercourse, so the geographical object that it initially designated is the river. This river, attested since the beginning of the fifteenth century, is the largest Romanian river, crossing areas, villages and towns of historical, social and economic importance. That is why an important toponymic field has been developed around its name. This field, characterized by the diversity of place-names, contains toponyms which designate different geographical objects (springs, watercourses and parts thereof, mountains, a gorge, a depression, abridge, a meadow, communication ways, and large administrative units) or localities in the vicinity of this river. Only one name (Bistricioara) is obtained from the Bistriţa name by derivation with the diminutive suffix -ioara; the rest of the toponymic field is represented by syntagms formed of the term Bistriţa and various constituents (nouns, adjectives or prepositions). We can see a presence of homonymy cases and a variety of forms attested by documents. The diachronic depiction of the toponymic fields is an important step for the lexicographical approach of place names because it reflects the dynamic reality discovered on the field.
Due to its accelerated modernization that raises special problems, challenges and discussions (among others, the intergenerational stratification, the way the speakers are reporting themselves to the ...norm, the linguistic homogeneity, etc.), the situation of the Romanian language spoken in Rotunda and Săbăoani is a continuous process. Since the change seems to be oriented in the direction of diminishing regional “roughness”, with significant consequences concerning the very profile of the local variety of the Romanian language, it appears as legitimate to verify, based on certain features (typical: absolute or relative, in terms of Ion Gheție), to what extent it falls within the dialectal unit of higher rank. The observation that the set of Moldavian distinctive elements (diagnostic features) is partially respected, especially by the more conservative generation, cannot, however, generate definitive conclusions regarding the position of the Rotunda and Săbăoani idioms in the area of Moldavian speeches. Beyond the assumption that, considering its conditions, the investigation could have at least partially distorted the results (through self-control practiced by speakers while communicating with outsiders), there is a possibility that this modernization process may have affected other Moldavian idiomatic varieties to a similar extent. However, as long as our reference for the Moldavian dialectal ensemble is given by a 50 years old geolinguistic research, only the issue of a new Romanian linguistic atlas, by regions, could compensate this shortcoming.
The contribution opens with an overview about the position of French in the repertory of Valle d’Aosta, a small bilingual region of Italy, where, despite of its historical grounding as heritage ...language, this language appears nowadays in a very critical situation, in particular at the level of spoken use. Against this background stands the focus of the contribution, that is to discuss the process of language shift occurred in Valle d’Aosta between the 19th and the 20th centuries. This process led to the substitution of French with Italian as “roofing language” and it tends to be regarded as a typical case of “language murder”, in literature but namely in the regional inner perspective, that identifies its starting point in the national unification of Italy (1861).A re-reading of some evidences, both from historical sources and sociolinguistic more recent inquiries, permits although to shed new light on this process, on both plans of the role played in it by sectors of the local speech community and of the parallel construction of an internal identitary story-telling that assumes the Valle d’Aosta community’s integral francophonie of the past as an unquestionable matter of fact.The discussion of a series of issues (i.e. the correct interpretation of the instances of written French in Valle d’Aosta since the Middle Ages; the consideration of the results of the sociolinguistic survey conducted by the Fondation Chanoux in 2001, with particular regard to the spoken use of languages in the generation born at the end of 19th century; the historiographical testimony, for the same century, about the early presence of Italian within the region) thus lead to depict on one side the historical linguistic repertory of Valle d’Aosta as a typical situation of “diglossia” and, on the other, the process of penetration of Italian as a gradual and long-lasting phenomenon, which begins several decades before 1861.On this bases, new considerations about the active role of Valle d’Aosta 19th century speech community in the above mentioned process of language shift are finally proposed, which may lead to consider it rather an instance of “linguistic suicide” (Denison 1977) than an actual “language murder”.
The article is a systematic, corpus-based account of Latin’s influence on the position of Old English (OE) adnominal adjectives. While multiple studies on phrase-level syntax suggest that source-text ...interference may have been partly responsible for placing the adjective after the head noun, this observation has so far received little quantitative underpinning. The present article offers a detailed comparison of OE target noun phrases containing postnominal adjectives with their Latin counterparts to determine the exact extent to which this arrangement may have been a syntactic calque from a foreign language. The study has found that while a fair number of OE postposed adjectives did copy their Latin originals, their placement could be accounted for through reference to tendencies characteristic of OE (i.e. the adjective displays different degrees of “verbalness” or is part of a heavy phrase). Therefore, it appears that translated texts do not have to be excluded or treated with particular suspicion in studies concerned with the position of adnominal adjectives.
The article describes the syntactic processes that occur at the level of the sentence. Are examined the characteristic features of all the coordinated and subordinate sentences recorded in the text ...of the popular novel Sandipa, a handwritten copy dated to the end of the 18th century in the northern part of historical Moldavia and preserved at the Russian State Library, Moscow (ms. Rom. 824, Grigorovici fund). The syntactic manifestations are researched from the point of view of their presence in the oldest Romanian language writings and in the contemporary ones with the manuscript we are dealing with, referring, as the case may be, to the situation in the current literary language.
Our work aims to provide an introduction to the complex issues related to fashion terminology. We try to describe the main characteristics of fashion and its terminology, seen as phenomena in a ...perpetual dynamic.
