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Polish jarmułka ‘Jewish skullcap’ is generally considered to be an old Turkish loanword. In Bohdan A. Struminsky’s 1987 article this etymology is contested and replaced with a Latin one. However, Struminsky failed to present convincing arguments against the Turkish origin of the Polish word and his Latin explanation does not seem absolutely perfect either. This article critically examines Struminsky’s...
The author assumes that etymological analyses are “ethnolinguistically relevant” because by reconstructing the motivation of names, etymology allows one to reach the methods of linguistic conceptualization of phenomena and objects. He discusses the words świat ‘world’, kwiat ‘flower’, and gwiazda ‘star’ (endorsing Brückner’s and Sławski’s thesis that they all belong to a single etymological nest),...
The paper discusses Podhalan vocabulary contained in Andrzej Bańkowski’s Etymologiczny słownik języka polskiego (SEBań) ‘Polish etymological dictionary’. It scrutinizes the information on the origin of words, and also their dating and other parts of Bańkowski’s commentary. By contrasting data from dialectal atlases and dialectal and etymological dictionaries, this author shows that the material found...
The article claims that many Polish dialectal plant names are not folk in their origin. The only way to ascertain the true origin of a given name is by analysing the history of the dialectal name and the related names in other languages. Such analysis leads to the conclusion that Polish dialectal names have various origins. A part of them constitute truly dialectal names, i.e. such that originate...
The article examines the methodology and criteria of identification of Polish loan words in Lithuanian. Also etymology, peculiar developments, and trends in the infiltration of these borrowings are discussed. The following conclusions are proposed based on our analysis: 1) Polonisms in Lithuanian can be divided into three groups, based on the principles of (α) establishing the primary source of the...
The paper shows that it is not just the habit of drinking coffee and tea that has changed over the centuries, but also the lexicon of the related semantic circle. Polish preserves the basic vocabulary pertaining to the culture of coffee and tea drinking; some units have undergone a semantic metamorphosis and remained in the language, others did not withstand the test of time and faded into oblivion...
The paper debates the interpretation of the etymology of Polish lipa ‘something untrue’ given by A. Bańkowski in his Etymologiczny słownik języka polskiego ‘Etymological dictionary of Polish’. Based on Russian and Polish lexicographical data, the author describes the rise of the Russian noun липа as a derivative from the older adjective липовый ‘false, counterfeit’ in the thieves’ slang of the 19th...
The paper tries to answer the question about the onomastic base of the names for ‘juniper’ and ‘viburnum’, i.e. which of their features or what image of these plants has been preserved in their names. The author tests whether the features captured in literary and dialectal Polish names for these shrubs are confirmed by folk texts, popular narratives and beliefs. Hypotheses put forward by etymologists...
The author cites five different etymological hypotheses for the general Slavic word jęczmień ‘barley’. Three refer to the features of the ear: its boniness, its shape during the time when the seeds ripen, and its adhesiveness; the other two adduce the sound that this cereal makes during the time of ripening, and its alleged taste. The paper aims to verify the cited hypotheses using the linguistic-cultural...
The paper presents to Polish linguists of various specializations the Romance etymological dictionary Dictionnaire Étymologique Roman (DÉRom) which, despite having existed for several years, remains entirely unknown in Poland. Its goal is to reconstruct the Romance protolanguage, protoroman, on as many levels as possible. Its novelty lies in the application of the historical-comparative method to...
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