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.

Bulgarian čalga and Romanian manele “ethno-pop” or “pop-folk” are loanwords from Turkish. Besides the etymology of these words, the features of pop-folk will be described from a linguistic, historical and sociocultural point of view. It is a phenomenon rooted in the local Romani cultures, which are characterized by multilingualism and linguistic creativity. At the same time, pop-folk in the Balkans is based on a long tradition of Oriental music.

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.

In this paper some Old Uigur words for traps are discussed. Among the words Maḥmūd al-Kāšgarī listed in his dictionary only tuzak is attested in Old Uigur. On the other hand, some other words such as kapgan, körp, sürgü, yipäk are known from Old Uigur texts, mainly from religious scriptures. An interesting feature is that different verbs are used together with the different trap terms: tuzak ur-, körp kaz-, kapgan ur-, sürgü tik-, yipäk tart-. These data give us some insight into the activities of hunters.

This paper demonstrates that by applying Chaos Theory to the modelling of the evolution of verbal forms and verbal systems, it is possible to view classical grammaticalization paths as universal, and align 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. This article – the second of series of three papers – will deal with a principled application of Chaos Theory to linguistics and with a new alternative interpretation of paths postulated by Path Theory.

The ever more popular and global use of English in the world is an undeniable fact. One of the obvious manifestations of this process is the selection of English as an official language, typically in former post-colonial states. Its global status, however, also motivates some African and Asian countries which have never been a part of the British Commonwealth to choose this tongue as an official state language (sometimes – the only official language) too. Does this decision assume that the citizens of those states know English fluently? How is English integrated in their everyday life? The case study of Namibian newspaper articles and personal advertisements from classified pages as well as billboard texts is an attempt to offer some insights into the use of the variety of English typical of this country both in the official and private milieu in writing. The objective of the study, presented in two parts (Part 1: theoretical background and Part 2: analysis of data) is to outline the unique context of the use of English in Namibia and describe the most characteristic features of Namibian English grammar when compared to Standard British English and on the basis of the results illustrate the existence of a social dialect continuum with regard to the use of the English language to be detected in the analysed written texts.