It is argued that certain words for jail in Diné bizaad (Navajo)„ e.g. ’awáalya and wáalya, come from Spanish. Although it has been long suspected that this word is a loanword, all the suggestions so far presented in the literature remain unconvincing on phonological grounds.

This paper considers the Greek language as a member of the Standard Average European (SAE) linguistic area as defined by Haspelmath (1998, 2001). After a brief presentation of the model, there follows a detailed analysis from this perspective of four selected features in Greek: relative clauses with relative pronouns, the “have”-perfect with a passive par- ticiple, participial passives, and negation. The approach applied focuses on specifics that concern standard and non-standard varieties, not only in the language system itself but also in its diachronic development. The results are then measured using Seiler’s (2019) classification of SAE features, with an eye to enriching the classification both empirically and theoretically.

* The paper was written with the support of the project “European Changes and Stability: Ancient Civilizations and Languages in Later European Transformations” (MUNI/A/1208/2022), funded by Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and constructive remarks that helped to improve this paper.

The paper discusses the etymology of Slavonic loanwords found in a previously unpublished South-Western Karaim translation of the Book of Daniel copied into manuscript no. ADub.III.84. South-Western Karaims were surrounded by speakers of Polish, Ukrainian and Russian, with the linguistic contact instigating changes in Karaim over a period of several centuries. The present article focuses only on the Slavonic impact upon Karaim vocabulary and attempts to determine whether the borrowed words can be traced back to Polish, Ukrainian or Russian etymons. The loanwords are additionally compared with their counterparts in ancient Polish Bible translations.

A discussion of the problem of “Altaic” influence on Proto-Slavic is the main focus of this paper. In its first part, chronological and terminological questions are presented; the second part is devoted to etymologies (*baranъ ‘ram’, *koza ‘goat’, *klobukъ ‘fur cap, hat’, *kъlbasa ‘sausage’, sablja ‘sabre’).