The paper approaches an important issue of the phonological similarity of words, relevant for current research in phonotactics, word recognition, production and acquisition, by analyzing the data collected in an experiment in which 30 native speakers of Polish were asked to provide phonologically similar words to 80 nonwords. The study demonstrates that the uncovered patterns of phonological similarity (segment substitutions, deletions and additions, the use of bigrams, trigrams and quadrigrams, noncontiguous sounds and segment metathesis) go beyond the commonly employed concept of neighbourhood density and point to the need to revise the current approaches to phonological similarity of words. It is argued that the experimental results can be attributed to the considerably more complex phonotactic and morphological structure of Polish than English.
A subject of the paper Substantive Declension in Slavic Linguistic Atlas is based on an extensive field research of the Dialects of all Slavic languages. The territory of the research is delimited by the international Slavistic project Slavic Linguistic Atlas the database of which is formed by answers to 3400 questions within 853 localities of the overall Slavic territory. However, not all the forms of all the substantive paradigms are presented, but only the selected representative phenomena testifying to the natural constitutive processes of the national languages in connection with the phonetic changes proving the specifi c character of the linguistic development under the infl uence of a genetically homogeneous or heterogeneous environment and testifying to linguistic changes as results of intercultural, interlingual and probably also inter-confessional infl uences. The final part of the publication is oriented upon the constitutive processes of substantive declination in the Slavic macro-areas (South-Slavic, West-Slavic, and East-Slavic – and within them also in the particular Slavic languages) from the point of view of “otherness” and “foreignness”, i.e. from the point of view of the original and non-original grammatical endings in the particular declension types. The genuine basis of the transgression from the original domestic elements to the new ones gets manifested not only within the adaptation processes of the lexical level, but its basis is hidden in the long-term stabilization processes, in systemic changes by which the inner structure of the language, the area of the distribution of changes, and their impact upon the typological substance of the language are modified. By its interpretative character, the paper The Interpretation of Substantive Declension in Slavic Languages aims at integrating the genetic, areal as well as typological aspects of the investigated domain.
Berber languages outside Mauritania have a number of different morphological classes of vowel-final and semivowel-final verbs (“final weak verbs”). The situation in Zenaga of Mauritania looks very different. In this article, the Zenaga reflexes of the non- Mauritanian weak verbs are compared by studying all relevant cognates. As a result, it proves possible to establish to what extent the main weak verb classes of non- Mauritanian Berber are reflected in Zenaga, and to what extent certain irregularities can be understood from Zenaga-internal developments.
My series “Some Berber Etymologies” is to gradually reveal the still unknown immense Afro-Asiatic heritage in the Berber lexical stock. The first part with some miscellaneous Berber etymologies was published back in 1996. Recently, I continued the series according to initial root consonants1 in course of my research for the volumes of the “Etymological Dictionary of Egyptian” (abbreviated as EDE, Leiden, since 1999, Brill)2 with a much more extensive lexicographical apparatus on the cognate Afro-Asiatic daughter languages. As for the present part, it greatly exploits the results of my ongoing work for the the fourth volume of EDE (analyzining the Eg. lexical stock with initial n-). The present part contains etymologies of Berber roots with initial *n- followed by dental stops. The numeration of the entries continues that of the preceding parts of this series. In order to spare room, I quote those well-attested and widespread lexical roots that appear common Berber, only through a few illustrative examples. The underlying regular consonant correspondences between Berber vs. Afro-Asiatic agree with those established by the Russian team of I.M. Diakonoff and summarized by A.Ju. Militarev (1991, 242–3).
The paper first gives a survey of all the etymologies proposed so far for the Greek term for „pyramid” within the Greek language and the Oriental languages. Then the elaboration of a wholly new suggestion is ventured on the basis of phonological criteria in the context of the supposed Late Egyptian source language.
This article is a supplement to Nemeth (2015), in which the absolute and relative chronology of the 18th and 19th century Karaim sound changes was presented with the aim of reconstructing how Middle Western Karaim evolved into its two well-known Modern Western Karaim dialects. Most of the conclusions formulated in Nemeth (2015) are further confirmed in the present article, while a few have been slightly modified.