This article presents an etymological case study on Pre-Greek (PG): it analyzes about 20 words starting with the letter N that have been catalogued as ‹PG› or ‹PG?› in the new Etymological dictionary of Greek (EDG), but for which alternative explanations are equally possible or more likely. The article starts by discussing the Leiden etymological dictionaries series, then discusses the EDG and the concept of PG and then analyzes the individual words. This analysis is performed by giving an overview of the most important earlier suggestions and contrasting it with the arguments used to catalogue the word as PG. In the process, several issues of Indo-European phonology (such as the phoneme inventory and sound laws) will be discussed.

Difficulties in tracing the etymology of lexical isolates and loans from other languages are exemplified in the discussion of a gathering of English words previously without satisfactory explanations of origin. In particular, recognition of the adstratum effects of the Irish language on British English over several centuries prompts a call not only for numerous revisions to entries in our standard lexicographical reference works but for a fundamental rethinking of relations between these multiply overlapping speech communities.

In the article the author deals with the meaning of the Buddhist-Uyghur term ürlüksüz nomlar in a passage of the so-called “Manichaean Poṭhī-book”. As many specific Buddhist terms ürlüksüz nomlar can be found in no other Manichaean-Uyghur texts and has to be translated in this context as “momentary elements of consciousness”.

Stanisław Stachowski wrote a series of articles devoted to studies on the New Persian loanwords in Ottoman-Turkish, which were published in Folia Orientalia in the 1970s and later republished in 1998 as a single volume. Since then, however, a good number of editions of new Ottoman texts have appeared, especially transcription texts dating from before Meninski’s Thesaurus (1680), which provide much new lexical material. Within this material there are many Persianisms – predictably enough where Ottoman-Turkish is concerned. This paper aims to supplement Stachowski’s work with words of Persian origin taken from pre-Meninski transcription texts. It is divided into two parts, the first including data to be added to entries already recorded by Stachowski (eight articles), the second containing data that constitute new entries (three articles). A short historical-etymological note on the words dealt with also features at the end of each entry.

Stanisław Stachowski wrote a series of articles devoted to studies on the New Persian loanwords in Ottoman-Turkish, which were published in Folia Orientalia in the 1970s and later republished in 1998 as a single volume. Since then, however, a good number of editions of new Ottoman texts have appeared, especially transcription texts dating from before Meninski’s Thesaurus (1680), which provide much new lexical material. Within this material there are many Persianisms – predictably enough where Ottoman-Turkish is concerned. This paper aims to supplement Stachowski’s work with words of Persian origin taken from pre-Meninski transcription texts. It is divided into two parts, the first including data to be added to entries already recorded by Stachowski (eight articles), the second containing data that constitute new entries (three articles). A short historical-etymological note on the words dealt with also features at the end of each entry.

Stanisław Stachowski wrote a series of articles devoted to studies on the New Persian loanwords in Ottoman-Turkish, which were published in Folia Orientalia in the 1970s and later republished in 1998 as a single volume. Since then, however, a good number of editions of new Ottoman texts have appeared, especially transcription texts dating from before Meninski’s Thesaurus (1680), which provide much new lexical material. Within this material there are many Persianisms – predictably enough where Ottoman-Turkish is concerned. This paper aims to supplement Stachowski’s work with words of Persian origin taken from pre-Meninski transcription texts. It is divided into two parts, the first including data to be added to entries already recorded by Stachowski (eight articles), the second containing data that constitute new entries (three articles). A short historical-etymological note on the words dealt with also features at the end of each entry.

This paper demonstrates that by applying Chaos Theory to the modeling of the evolution of verbal forms and verbal systems, it is possible to view classical grammaticalization paths as universal, and conceal this deterministic assumption with the unpredictability of concrete grammatical developments. The author argues that such an explanation is possible because traditional grammaticalization paths do not represent realistic cases of grammatical evolutions, but rather correspond to abstract and non-realistic deterministic laws which codify the order of the incorporation of new meanings to the semantic potential of a gram. Therefore, from a synchronic perspective, they can be used to represent the semantic potential of a form as a map or a state. In contrast, a realistic development emerges as a trajectory connecting such maps or states. Consequently, the cross-linguistic typological model of realistic evolutionary processes of a certain type corresponds to a state-space – it is a cluster of all possible trajectories the grams of a certain class can travel. In this article – the first of the series of three papers – the main tenants of Chaos Theory will be discussed.