The paper reviews the various situations, which allow to postulate that Proto-Romanian did have a specific phoneme, a laryngeal or, perhaps, a velar spirant, conventionally noted as *X. The glossary ...and the case studies preceding it suggest that there are strong arguments supporting the reconstruction of such a phoneme; vatră, fărâmă, ceafă and buf are analyzed in more detail, but the list is a lot longer. The paper also discusses the situation of Proto-Slavic ch χ, which – in initial position at least – also witnesses the existence of a ‘special phoneme’ in pre-expansion Slavic. The relationship between the Romanian and the Slavic forms should be understood in the light of old north Thracian and Proto-Romanian relations with Proto-Slavic. These were approached in other works and studies.
The author tries to summarize the recent results in various fields of investigation — linguistics, history, archaeology, DNA analysis — referring to southeast Europe, mainly regarding the ...Romanian‐Slavic relations. He also briefly resumes the discussions referring to the so‐called ‘earliest Slavic borrowings in Romanian’, with a brief look at another interesting term, *tъrgъ, but also at the not‐at‐all clear relation between Rom. oraș and Hung. város. The hypotheses regarding the origins of the Albanians are also briefly considered as the conventionally called ‘ethnogenesis’ of the Romanians, Slavs and m Albanians is one problem with various facets, not different problems. The conclusion is that the years to come should witness a radical change in analyzing the past, specifically the period of migrations, from 4th to 10th centuries A.D., during which the social and cultural realities were more complex than currently acknowledged.
The authors discusses the theory of Harvey E. Mayer, published in the journal Lituanus. Mayer’s hypothesis is built upon the presumptuous assertion that Thracians and Dacians were ‘Baltoidic’ ethnic ...groups, some southern migrations to the south, having as a result a kind of deformed Balts, or how we can else define ‘Baltoidic’. Such an abrupt definition and interpretation of Thracian and/or Dacian cannot be accepted. Nevertheless, Mayer’s approach resumes, in fact, older analyses of the Thracian and Baltic relations, once also approached by M. M. Rădulescu, whose studies are now forgotten and unknown to Mayer as well (even if written in English). There are also interesting, and little known, similarities between some substratum elements of Romanian and Baltic, mainly Lithuanian, forms. The complex problems implied in such analyses open, in fact, the gates to large-scale investigations referring to the Thracian, Baltic and Slavic relations, as underlined in other recent works, and which may be resumed from the Baltic perspective, but also from the perspective of the substratum elements of Romanian as some of them prove striking similarities with Baltic, not with Slavic.
The paper briefly presents the main tendencies in aspectology as developed over the last decades, and also the specific situation in Czech as compared to English or, very briefly, with Hungarian. The ...author approached the topic on several occasions, quite extensively in Paliga 2011, especially pp. 101 sq., but also on previous occasions beginning with 1980. The situation is Slavic aspectology lacks a clear definition, is still chaotic and would require consensus in what may be labeled a terminological reform or, at least, a clarification of terms used in particular situations v. general situations. The authors shares the little spread view that Czech has three, not two aspects, and discusses some relevant examples. The tendency of the language will probably towards a larger tri-aspectual structure, a process in full development.
The paper resumes the paper dedicate to Slavic sъto (Paliga 1988), bringing forth various arguments against the label of Marko Snoj that explaining sъto as a loanword from a north Thracian dialect is ...‘najmanj utemeljeno’ (least founded). New data may now prove, without little doubt, that the only satem idiom, which may be the source of borrowing, is a north Thracian dialect. Some other forms in the semantic sphere ‘fire’ and ‘to burn, to heat’ support the initial analysis and show that we have, in fact, two series of phonetic evolutions from PIE to Slavic and Thracian in a larger Indo-European context.
Localizing the dialogues when running an operating system or an application has become an interesting activity over the last two decades. The breathtaking spread of computer technique has led to a ...larger and larger use of computers, which has thus reached social strata with a lower level of linguistic capabilities, even if we refer to English. The real number of those capable of mastering English at a good level is lower than currently acknowledged. The paper focuses on an activity rarely approached as a university discipline in Romania, even if it clearly represents a chapter — or a subchapter at the worst — of translation techniques. Translating the computer dialogues has remained an isolated, not rarely chaotic activity, without any coherent approach and without any norms. The users, mainly those without a good knowledge of English, are the direct and innocent victims of such a situation. The paper, seemingly the first such approach in the field, sums up the main problems and suggests some further steps in order to improves the current situation.
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