The text of the Sigismund III sentence in the disputes of Kiev burghers with castle craftsmen about refusing them to participate in «munitio a conditio» of the city, the castle burghers under threat of a fine (500 kopecks of the Lithuanian hryvnas) forced to perform fortification works and participation in raising funds in the public order for the defense of the city is published. The decree was issued on February 28, 1622 in Warsaw in Polish. It was included in the collection of letters confirming the Magdeburg Law of Kyiv (from 1544 to 1659) by Polish rulers. Collection of privileges copied at the beginning of the XVIII century for the own needs of Burmese Koz’ma Krychevetc. It was translated from Polish and Latin into Ukrainian by sotnyks A. Trotcyna and M.Yagelnytskyi. The monumental book is stored in the Central State Historical Archive of Kyiv. In the article the linguistic features of the monumental book on the graphic, phonetic and morphological levels are analyzed. Variants in writing that are caused by the written tradition of that time, the lack of normalization of old and new forms, the writers’ idiolect and the influence of Polish and, less often, the Church Slavonic language. The vocabulary has been characterized from the point of view of its origin, the presence of a large number of Polonisms, Latinisms and Germanisms has been noted. In the text translators often used words-doublets and synonyms for clarification of a number of concepts.

The question of what is the difference between borrowing and code-switching has attracted the attention of scholars far and wide and gave at the same time rise to a plethora of publications in order to draw a boundary between these two terms. In the most recent of these publications (Grosjean 1982, Poplack & Meechan 1995 & 1998; to name but a few), it has been often argued that borrowings are donor-language items that are integrated in the grammar of the recipient language at a community level, while code-switches take place at individual level and they retain the grammar of the language from which they derive. However, the current political and economic uncertainties in various regions of the world have been found to cause mass refugee movements to conflict-free places, where contact between newcomers and locals usually lead to some kind of linguistic interinfluencing. The current study discusses the contactinduced German-origin lone lexical items used by Iraqi-Arabic-speaking refugees in Germany. It is the aim of this study to show whether or not these lexical items can be considered as code-switches or established borrowings. The data I am analyzing come from spontaneous and elicited conversations of the first and second wave of Iraqi- Arabic-speaking refugees and asylum seekers to Germany as well as from online- and paper-pencil-questionnaires.

More than 30 years ago Andrzej Zaborski (1983; 1987 {1983}) collected and analyzed all Cushitic and Omotic numerals, which were described in his time, and tried to analyze their internal structure. His two pioneering studies stimulated the present attempt to collect all available relevant data about Cushitic numerals and to analyze them in both genetic (Afroasiatic) and areal (Omotic, Ethio-Semitic and Nilo-Saharan) perspectives, all at the contemporary level of our knowledge. With respect to the long mutual interference between various groups of Cushitic and Omotic languages, it is necessary to study the numerals in both the language families together. The presented material is organized in agreement with the genetic classification of these languages. On the basis of concrete forms in individual languages the protoforms in partial groups are reconstructed, if it is possible, and these partial protoforms of numerals in the daughter protolanguages are finally compared to determine the inherited forms. The common cognates are finally compared with parallels in other Afroasiatic branches, if they exist, or with counterparts in Ethio-Semitic or Nilo-Saharan languages, if they could be borrowed from or adapted into the Cushitic or Omotic languages.

The aim of the present paper is to discuss metaphorical constructions, based on figurative uses of words, in informal Polish in the field of computers and the Internet. The study is based on the author’s own corpus, compiled on the basis of short informal texts (entries, posts) written on 32 selected Internet forums. Altogether, the corpus consists of 1,541,449 words. The paper, as the title suggests, focuses on one metaphorical formula, i.e. COMPUTERS ARE BUILDINGS. The metaphors which can be subsumed under this heading belong to the most frequent in the corpus (alongside a different type, i.e. COMPUTERS ARE HUMANS). They are discussed within the cognitive framework, as introduced by Lakoff and Johnson (1980). Some attention will also be devoted to the possible infl uence of English upon Polish metaphorical constructions used in the area of computers and the Internet.

A study of the Quran makes it clear, that the New and Old Testament traditions are manifest in various forms in the sacred book of Muslims. This paper presents the phenomenon of these biblical borrowings, giving the references in the Quran to the biblical persons and main themes. One finds many of the Old and New Testament stories of the prophets sometimes in precise forms where the Quranic records are relative identical with the Biblical versions. On other fragments the Quranic narra- tives contain elements of Biblical traditions mixed with folklore and fables extracted from the Talmud and in some cases (such as the story of Abraham and the idols) the sources are entirely Midrashic-Haggadic or Apocryphal. It is worth to be pointed out that the influence of orthodox Christianity on the Quran was slight but apocryphal and heretical Christian legends are clearly visible in the various Quranic fragments. Probably it is a result of Muhammad’s journeys between Syria, Hijaz, and yemen.

Scholars have adopted a number of different theories explaining the phenomenon of the biblical borrowings found in the Quran. For example it is said about Muham- mad’s dependence upon Jewish teachers and thus an overarching Jewish influence on Islam. It is generally admitted that Muhammad had opportunity to come into contact with yemenite, Abyssinian, Ghassanite, and Syrian Christians, especially heretic.

Analyzes of the Quran in the light of parallel passages in the Bible, Talmud and Apocrypha permits us to formulate an idea that early Islamic revelations were com- pilation of Muhammad inspiration with repetition of information coming to his ears, some of it Biblical and true to history, the rest predominantly mythical and fictitious. This thesis is not accepted by Muslim scholars, who maintain that the Qur’an is the divine word of God without any interpolation.

Under the name of ‘pivot derivation’, this article reconsiders a phenomenon known by Arab grammarians and lexicographers as well as by Arabists and Semitists: the derivation of a secondary lexical family from a primary one, via a morphologically ambiguous form. Through the examples of ma‘īn, masīḥ and ma/isāḥa, and a rereading of Mez (1906), it proposes several extensions of this type of derivation, made possible not only by homophony but also by homography or phonetic accidents, and compatible with the borrowing from other languages.

The article presents vocabulary, both indigenous Polish and borrowed, connected with human characteristics arising from man’s appearance, character and behaviour as used in the petty nobility village of Dorohań and the peasant village of Wójtowce in Ukraine on the east bank of the Zbruch river. 204 words were analyzed divided into three main thematic categories and smaller groups, i.e. behavioural traits, moral deeds, status characteristics, mental abilities; appearance traits, character features and physical and emotional state words. The analysis showed that the foreign – Ukrainian and Russian – influence on the Polish vocabulary of the peasant village of Wójtowce is stronger than on the vocabulary of the petty nobility village of Dorohań. At the same time, the residents of Wójtowce use indigenous and borrowed words that are more expressive, both positively and negatively, what can be explained by the more frequent use of Polish in their everyday life. Comparison with other Polish dialects in Ukraine has revealed a certain similarity but also diversity, what can serve as the basis for further linguistic as well as cultural, ethnographic or anthropological research.

The article is based on an old prints language analysis of Medicines for dormant male intent by Demyan Nalyvayko (Ostrih, 1607), Mirrors of Theology by Kyrylo Stavrovetsky (Pochaiv, 1618), Eucharist by Sofroniy Pochasky (Kyiv, 1637). Shown is how important the colloquial Polish component was for an old-Ukrainian scribe, whose aim was to write his works “in an understandable manner”. It is focused on the fact that, despite the significant percentage of spoken Ukrainian elements in the texts of educated Ruthenians of the day, efforts s to create a colloquial text were linguistically made not only by employing the locally spoken Ukrainian. Numerous glosses, lexical doublets, syntactic constructions indicate the noticeable presence of Polish as a language in order to present the material to the reader in an understandable form. In the works of D. Nalyvayko, K. Stavrovetsky, S. Pochasky and many others, educated Ruthenians tended to write in a vernacular language embodied by the formula: local spoken Ukrainian plus Polish. There are many examples of the inclusion of structural elements from one language within the other, as shown by the analyzed material.

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.