This note reacts to an article by Marek Stachowski in Studia Linguistica UIC (no. 127, 2010, pp. 179–186) by suggesting that a phonemic opposition between /b/ and /v/ may be a relatively late development in the world’s known languages and by suggesting that dialectal Turkish goğuz ‘nutshell’ may in some way be etymologically related to certain words in Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew, and Persian meaning ‘nut’.

Some problems connected with the phonetic adaptation of Mongolian loanwords in Khakas are discussed in the article. The focus is on non-uniform reflexes of Mongolian VCV groups, especially on the change into a short vowel in Mongolian loanwords found in the Khakas language.

The aim of the article is to analyse the grammatical rules for the use of English articles which are offered to students of English as a foreign language and evaluate them from the perspective of their pedagogical effectiveness. The article highlights the most problematic issues and the potential weaknesses of the rules most commonly used in contemporary pedagogical/reference grammars. It is argued that some of the problems identified could be at least partially solved or avoided by the introduction of rules based on Cognitive Grammar. A brief outline of the Cognitive Grammar conception of articles is presented to show how the specific “uses” of articles can be subsumed under more general, broader, conceptually-based rules.

Generally, we can observe in European languages a high percentage of plant names among the words with unclear etymology. Many designations for plants – like for trees – derive from pre-Indo-European languages. Latin tree names are in most cases far from an unambiguous etymological assignment.

This article presents a preliminary, data-driven study of a corpus of texts written by advanced Polish learners of English, which were analysed with reference to a baseline corpus of native-speaker texts. The texts included in both corpora were produced in similar circumstances (classroom setting), with the same time and word limit, and in response to the same task. We conducted a comparative lexical analysis of the two corpora, using corpus methodology (word lists, cluster analysis, concordances, keyness) to identify the most significant differences. The most important conclusion from this study is that advanced foreign language use may differ from native-speaker language use in ways which only become visible in larger samples of language, and the differences, if analysed individually, would not be regarded as errors and would go unnoticed. There is some evidence in the study that some of these differences may be attributed to cross-linguistic influence.

The question of dialect mingling in Karaim has been raised by several authors. We know that there was continual contact between members of most Karaim communities during at least the last three centuries, but we know little about the intensity of the discussed phenomenon. Manuscripts reflecting the spoken language serve as our only source of knowledge. One must, however, be careful when editing them since not every manuscript that contains linguistic material referring to more than one Karaim dialect is to be treated as proof of dialect mingling. The present paper presents a critical edition of a Karaim manuscript written in 1868 which contains both north- and south-western elements, and aims to answer the question whether this document can be treated as a relevant example of dialect mingling.

This paper is an edition of an article by Władysław Kotwicz (1872–1944) entitled Les voyelles longues dans les langues altaïques, which the author could not publish himself during wartime and did not live to publish after the War was over. The edition is designed to read almost as if published by Kotwicz, but without falsifying the actual manuscript. Also, a brief archival description is provided and the history of the last four years of the text has been reconstructed, based mostly on Kotwicz’s correspondence.