A contrastive analysis of legal terminology based on Polish and German labour law

The paper constitutes an attempt to apply methods used in linguistics and in terminology studies based on jurisprudence in order to compare specialist vocabulary from the field of Polish and German labour law. The presentation is divided into a theoretical and an empirical part. The theoretical part contains a brief description of the bilateral and unilateral methods used in contrastive linguistics, and subsequently presents methods of legal comparative studies applicable to terminology studies as well as relations observable between lexemes of general and specialist language. The empirical part discusses selected terms of Polish and German labour law which were a subject of a comparative analysis conducted with the help of the methods described in the theoretical part. The paper ends with a summary and conclusions stemming from the analysis.

Beekeeping in the Balkans: Mythology and etymology

In Southeastern Europe the bee played a central role as a mythological being in ancient times. Very old traditions connected to beekeeping have been preserved right up to the present day. This applies to the material culture as well as the domain of popular beliefs. After tracing the roots and history of beekeeping in Ancient Greece, Bulgaria and Romania, using examples of words belonging to the semantic field of beekeeping we show its etymological complexity, while commenting on word origins, derivational processes and semantic developments.

In the first part of this study (Németh 2013a) a critical edition of two Karaim letters is presented. They were sent in 1868 from Odessa to addressees living Lutsk by a citizen born in Trakai. This paper (the second part of the study) contains a detailed linguistic analysis of the letters. Special attention is paid to the dialectal affiliation of the manuscripts’ linguistic material, to interdialectal contacts and to the irregularities recorded.

This paper is an attempt to account for the number and frequency of individual characters in the Gothic corpus. The first section explains the foundation of this statistical study, i.e. the text used and the number of characters in the main text of individual Gothic documents. The second section contains a more detailed study of all the characters in the Gothic manuscripts, and in a subsection an attempt is made to extend this study to phonemes (or principal speech sounds). The third section treats the numerals and the fourth concludes. All numbers occurring in the Gothic corpus are listed in the Appendix.

This paper investigates the language of the vernacular version of Lanfranco’s Chirurgia parva in the manuscript Ital. Quart. 67 kept at the Jagiellonian Library in Krakow. The brief description of the linguistic traits leads to the determination of the place of origin of the manuscript. From the initial idea that the manuscript was made in Northern Italy, through the examination of orthographic, phonetic, morphologic and lexical features, I arrive at the conclusion that the codex must have been written in Veneto, and more precisely in central Veneto, maybe in or near Padua. The language itself may be described as the expression of the “koiné di terraferma”, a very characteristic Venetian variety of the 15th century that combined local and Tuscan characteristics.