The author believes that Central Europe is a region stretching from the Alps − Adriatic Sea as far as the Baltic Sea. (= the Amber road region.) From a linguistic viewpoint Central Europe is a language union, predominantly affected by the German language. The characteristics of this union are: linguistic purism, the belt of composite languages, the belt of languages with affix sequences, with preverbs, a unification in the rectio system.

Although it is easy to fathom why Eurolinguistic research tends to concern what is called Standard Average European (see Haspelmath 2001) rather than peripheral non-Indo-European languages of Europe this author’s opinion is that a closer look precisely at the latter makes the linguistic picture of Europe more interesting, more true and more complex. At the same time a few methodological questions arise. Some of them are presented and (partially) discussed in this study.

The present text gives an overview of the European context of language education in the last quarter of the 20th century and presents the main trends in the European language policy conducted by the Council of Europe and the European Union. The impact of the situation on the teaching profession and challenges posed by dynamic socio-political changes are then discussed as well as the support offered by enabling institutions such as the European Centre for Modern Languages in Graz. Open questions and controversies are also identified calling for future research. The text ends with a list of implications for the future of the profession as well as for pre- and in-service teacher education.

This paper is generally about the two fundamental ways of expressing ideas in academic discourse, i.e. either through stating things in terms of the conceptual pattern: X IS Y, or in terms the pattern X IS LIKE Y. The former, though much widespread in the said discourse is argued to be fundamentally false as it produces statements of the predicative (absolutive) type, which as the article shows, is not within the grasp of human reasonable mind. Instead, what is suggested is the pattern X IS LIKE Y, which by containing a pivotal element “like” guarantees the discourse to be at most approximative rather than predicative of the Truth. The general claim is that academic discourse, being essentially speculative, should stylistically reflect the aforementioned “be like” strategy in the description of things rather than “to be” strategy. The latter, as argued below, does a lot of harm to academic discussion as it is groundlessly authoritarian and as such appears as inadequate vehicle in the description of the world. This proviso applies both to sciences and humanities, contrary to the common stereotype. The claim in this paper is that both sciences and humanities operate at the level of facts. This stands in opposition to a popular belief, where facts are the realm of sciences, while non-facts the prerogative of the humanities.
The overall argument is contextualized in relation to the discussion of the selected excerpts of classic monographs within Translation Studies, which in its history aspired to be both “scientific” and “scholarly”. The analysis of the excerpts will demonstrate the pitfalls of the academic narrative, where the formulation of the ideas in a non-speculative way may disturb the reception of the argument in a sense that it is received as the only indisputable “truth”. This may, in turn, lead, to the suppression of the academic debate in which the two options emerge, i.e. either to accept a given view or reject it (as implicated in the formula X IS Y or X IS NOT Y, respectively). This yields no room for academic speculation. If this academic speculation is to survive, it should be implicated in the formula X IS LIKE Y, which as the claim goes, is the only intellectual tool upon which humans should rely in the process of approximating the Truth.

This article describes the emergence of the dialectal differences in phonology that eventually led to the division of Western Karaim into two dialects. The study is based on manuscripts and manuscript editions covering the period between the 17th and 20th centuries. Special attention is paid to the relative chronology of the phonological changes. A periodization of Western Karaim is also proposed.
 

Paul Rycaut’s The Present State of the Ottoman Empire is the first comprehensive description of the Ottoman Empire written in English by an author who reported firsthand. The first edition of 1666 was reprinted several times and translated into French, Dutch, Italian, Polish, Spanish, German and Russian. The present article provides information on the genesis, the structure and the sources of the English original as well as on the various translations and their interrelationship (the Spanish version was completely unknown until now, since the translator concealed the real authorship). On the basis of selected examples, the special interest of the work for the historical study of Turkish borrowings in European languages is illustrated.

Walther Heissig (1913–2005) was certainly one of the most influential researchers on Mongolian, well thought of by his fellows and esteemed by his students. This edition of archive materials concerning Heissig’s life and work (cited below as WH) is a good opportunity for this author to discuss some aspects of a future, possibly all-embracing biography of Heissig.

This paper deals with *-VRHi- sequences in Proto-Slavic. Under certain conditions they probably yielded *-VR’- sequences, thus introducing a new type of intonation – the so-called short neo-acute tone. If so, the evidence for Pinault’s law requires re-examination.