This article investigates the story of the origin and the expanse of the term caesar in the Indo-European languages. A hypothesis on the non-existence of the diphthongs /ai/ and /au/ in Gothic is used to show that the borrowing into Gothic occurred from Greek and renders the Greek spelling practice. Due to additional facts concerning the monophthongization of the diphthong /ai/ in Greek and Latin it is hypothesized that they might already represent not a diphthong but a single vowel. Counter-evidence is also stated, as the precise way of the borrowing still remains unknown.

Pre-Meninski addenda to Stanisław Stachowski’s “Beiträge zur Geschichte der griechischen Lehnwörter im Osmanisch-Türkischen”
Stanisław Stachowski’s “Beiträge zur Geschichte der griechischen Lehnwörter im Osmanisch-Türkischen”, published in Folia Orientalia 13 (1971 [1972]), 267-298, started a long series of historicallexicographical studies which the great Polish scholar devoted to foreign elements found in the Turkish Transkriptionstexte. Since then a number of scientific editions of these texts have however come out, particularly, in recent years, Filippo Argenti’s (1533), Pietro Ferraguto’s (1611) and Arcangelo Carradori’s (1650) very important handwritten lexicographical works, which had been but little or not at all known so far. As the aforementioned as well as other publications provide much material on the European loanwords in Ottoman-Turkish, which are mostly Graecisms, this paper aims to supplement Stachowski’s work both by adding data to original entries and presenting new words of Greek origin. It has to be pointed out that all the material comes from Transkriptionstexte dating from before Meninski’s Thesaurus (1680).

On the basis of formal correspondences and typological data, it is argued in this brief paper that an etymological connection probably exists between the Indo-European dative suffix *-ei and the Indo-European causative element *-ei- via a morpheme which Song (1996) describes as “PURP.” Most significantly, the paper demonstrates how typological data can serve a primary role in reconstruction rather than a merely evaluative one.