This is a note to support and expand recent work on the etymology of German Meerschweinchen, English guinea pig, and related forms with a body of dated evidence, including new first attestations for English guinea pig and Polish świnka morska.

This three-part study continues an inquiry earlier initiated in these pages into words listed in Oxford English dictionary as still without satisfactory etymologies. Loans from a variety of source languages are reviewed, accompanied by commentary on earlier lexicographical praxis as it relates to various popular registers of English.

This is the second part of a paper dealing with the concept of English as a “world” or “global language”. Here, results from two research projects conducted in Denmark are presented. They investigated the role of languages in academia and in businesses with a global perspective. Data are taken from Denmark and in part Japan. Two different narratives of English as a world language emerge.

This article is intended to explore the linguistic means of anglicization in Cuban Spanish. Thus, a corpus-driven database or glossary of this variant of Spanish has been elaborated to examine these English-induced units quantitatively and qualitatively, entailing a morpho-syntactic and semantic analysis of the anglicization process. This research study is based on two major stages: data collection and data processing of the lemmas compiled. The resulting glossary is used in this part of the study to unravel the morphological and syntactic features of the English-induced units, in particular those of gender and number. A compilation of these Cuban-Spanish units allows for a better understanding of morphological changes and lexical creativity, in keeping with the historical socioeconomic conditions of the island. The collection of colloquialisms, vulgarisms or obsolete words corroborates the diastratic and diaphasic evolution of lemmas, and unveils some distinctive word-building patterns.

Didżej and didżejować appeared in Polish due to language contact and loanword assimilation processes; the former is the English noun DJ in graphic disguise, the latter is a Polish verbal derivative that conceals the English etymon. The article focuses on discussing and exemplifying the multiple ways in which English acronyms and alphabetisms are assimilated and integrated in the Polish lexical and grammatical systems. Part 1 of the article discusses loanword adaptation processes that have been identified for English lexical loans in several European languages. The linguistic outcomes of loanword adaptation processes, which both occur during the borrowing process and follow it, serve to support an observation that intensive lexical borrowing from English is a change-provoking and development-motivating process that leads to linguistic diversity rather than linguistic homogeneity. An illustration of contact-induced linguistic diversity with corpus-driven data is preceded with a brief discussion of English abbreviations, which, in Part 2, are contrasted with their “polonized” versions that undergo formal, semantic and pragmatic changes in the recipient language.

In his miscella the author deals with the problems of scattered notes and remarks on Károly Rédei’s work Nord-ostjakischen Texte (Kazym-Dialekt) as well as with several reviews of this work and shows with which difficulties we are still confronted when dealing with all these materials. Indeed, there are still some remarks and corrections to be done on Rédei’s work which have been overlooked by all the reviewers, but besides all criticism the work is still worth reading since it is one of the most important collections of Northern-Ostyak texts.

In the following paper selected Greek words with initial zd- or h-, which could have developed from Proto-Indo-European initial Hi̭ or  i̭-, are analyzed. In the first part the position of the Greek language within the Indo-European family, the Laryngeal Theory and the history of research on the development of initial glide (H)i̭- in Greek are commented on. In the main segment, divided between the two parts of the paper, the criteria of the selection of the Greek words are put forward and the selected thirteen words analyzed in the light of the development of their initial segments. In the second part, the conclusions made on the basis of the analysis are confronted with theories on scenarios of relative chronology of the sound changes. Finally, typological data is adduced to favour one of the possible scenarios of changes.