During the period of Russian and Soviet domination over Tajikistan there was extensive Russian influence on the Tajik language, which is attested, among other features, by the great number of lexical borrowings. Interestingly, in the case of most of these forms Russian served only as a vehicular language and many are internationalisms, often known well to speakers of various European languages. These words were russianised on their introduction into Russian, before being transmitted on to other languages of Russia / the Soviet Union, Tajik being an example. Thus they often reveal specific Russian features in their morphology, phonology or semantics. The present article deals with a tendency noticeable in the Tajik of today, namely to remove these specific Russian features.

The Italic languages show a number of cases of vowel reduction and deletion. When working on the actual data, it is crucial to understand the role that accent played in such phonological changes. As for the qualitative nature of Italic accent, recent typological studies suggest that the Italic accent most likely had a dominant stress nature, rather than pitch nature, in the period when vowel reduction and deletion took place. The fact that these changes occurred primarily in non-initial syllables strongly supports the hypothesis that initial syllables were consistently stressed at some point in the history of Italic. Objections to this theory should thus be rejected as groundless. The systematic difference between the initial-stress rule of Pre-Literary Latin and the Penultimate Law of Literary Latin can also be explained within a metrical framework. On the other hand, although it is not immediately clear whether Sabellic acquired an accentual system like that of Literary Latin, the long-vowel notations in Oscan and Umbrian seem to point to the retention of the older system.

The present paper is the second of two papers investigating polyglot dictionaries which comprised Polish and English wordlists. It rests on the assumption that, by providing the earliest documentation material for Polish and English respectively, the polyglots can be regarded as historical antecedents of bilingual dictionaries. While the first paper focused on three Renaissance works of reference, including Calepino’s eleven-language edition, this one concentrates on two relatively little known endeavours of the Enlightenment: Christoph Warmer’s Gazophylacium decem linguarum Europaearum … (1691) and Peter Simon Pallas’ Linguarum totius orbis vocabularia comparativa … (1787–1789). The bilingual material they embrace has been analysed and illustrated with examples in order to shed new light on the two polyglots, which are additionally traced back to their sources.

Witold Mańczak’s oeuvre comprises various topics of historical linguistics. This article attempts to explain why some aspects of his theory are hardly accepted, yet his work still deserves interest and serious discussion.