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Wanda Decyk-Zięba : Between the East and the West: the history of Russian toponyms in the Polish language until 1795
Names from the area of Ruthenian duchies, which were the origin of Russia, appeared in the consciousness of Polish people as early as in the Middle Ages. The names from Annales… by Dlugossius and from the treatise by Maciej of Miechow indicate the intermediary function of the Ukrainian or Belorussian language (in the relevant literature these are generally called Ruthenian, borderland – East Slavonic influence). The information on Eastern Europe provided in the work by Miechowita revolutionised the geographical awareness of European people and made their author the pioneer of exploring this part of the continent. The Ukrainian influence (which at times overlapped with the Czech influence) is visible also in the chronicle by Bielski, and the Bellorussian influence is evident in Kronika polska… by Stryjkowski. The work by Herberstein has become the primary source of knowledge on Russia since mid-16th century. The geography by Boter provides scarcely any new information. The historical events of the 17th century: Polish-Russian wars, intensive diplomatic contacts, declarations of armistices and eternal peaces have not changed the state of knowledge about Russia provided by historical and geographical works. The nomenclature established in the 16th century preserved its liveliness until the 18th century; it is present both in Świat… by Łubieński and Nowe Ateny… by Chmielowski. The modernisation of the Russian names in the history of the Polish language is either the result of familiarity with the original forms (Stryjkowski) or the application of new papers published in the West (Łubieński, Karpiński, Siarczyński).
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Ewa Badyda : A woman priest and what next? About linguistic problems related to ordaining women
Anna Cegieła: Linguistic image of morality
The article analyses linguistic problems connected with the contemporary phenomenon of women entering the ministry. The discussed issue is focused on purely linguistic aspects, concerning the feminitive forms in Polish, and the cultural ones, referring to the titles of clergy. There are two possible ways of creating feminitive forms of titles, high positions and prestigious professions in Polish – by suffixal derivation and by leaving the masculine form uninflected, the latter being approved by the standard. However, the analysis of the language used on Internet information portals and in newspapers shows that beside the recommended forms (ta) ksiądz, (ta) pastor, (ta) biskup the suffixal forms and the expressions: pani pastor, pani biskup are widespread, the latter being also used as addressative forms. Referring to a woman bishop in the Catholic Mariavite Church as biskupka results from the need to emphasize its theological and cultural distinctiveness – the priesthood of women is the fundamental theological assumption of the church. In the case of churches of Protestant tradition the influence of a foreign language (German) is significant – those to whom the names refer belong to the environment of a foreign (German) language and the churches they represent are religious minorities in Poland, and hence the original titles were formed on the basis of a foreign language. Linguistic and cultural translation has to deal not only with the differences between etiquette rules in the two languages but also with the ones concerning the principles of word formation – deriving feminine forms from the masculine ones in German is highly regular, which allows to meet the requirements of gender equality in language. Referring to women priests, the occurrence new and still remote to Polish reality, is far from stabilization and it is difficult to say which of the tendencies observed will gain advantage in the future.
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Anna Cegieła : Linguistic image of morality
Metaphors used in everyday language and established collocations depict morality as a condition of our humanity, as our need and obligation. Our greatness and our humanity are the morality seen in the up – down, high – low perspective. Language shows that morality is like health, and being moral is a state of normality, a physiological state. Immorality is an illness. Morality is also a certain capability of choosing and doing good or an ability to do so. If a human being renounces it, they are no longer a human being. Morality and immorality are expressed in language in bright contrasts, which illustrate the confrontation between good and evil.
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Sybille K. Schmidt : Multilingual features of St Julia Ursula Ledóchowska’s idiolect (on the example of her letters)
The article discusses the multilingual features of the language used by St Julia Ursula Ledóchowska (1865–1939) which have not been examined until now on the basis of over 1,500 letters from the years 1885–1922, of which the most numerous and the most varied from the linguistic point of view is family correspondence. Born in an aristocratic family being a mixture of nationalities, the author of the letters acquired a varying command of eleven languages throughout her life: German, Polish, French, English, Italian, Russian, Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Latin. Since the private and friendly letter represents an informal variant of language, which is close to the spoken language, the analysis of the letters by St Julia Ursula revealed characteristic features observable in utterances made by multilingual people – numerous instances of code-switching (256) and quotations (655), among which quoted utterances of other people, proverbs and phraseologisms can be found apart from personal names, common nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. An interesting phenomenon in the idiolect of St Ursula’s as a multilingual person, which indicates boundaries between languages, is half-calques and half-quotations.
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Anna Turula : Modifying phraseological innovations as amalgams of meaning in view of the dynamic usage-based model
The subject of this article is modifying innovations of phraseological units analysed as instances of language usage and discussed on the basis of Langacker’s dynamic usage-based model. The mentioned innovations are treated at the same time as a manifestation of the creativity of language users, which means joining two or more symbolic units through combining or exchanging constituents. As a result, a new linguistic meaning develops, which is a complex conceptualisation using numerous cognitive domains that are interrelated in a variety of manners, according to Langacker. Depending on whether the instance of usage is considered from the point of view of the sender or the receiver of a message, such a conceptual amalgam (Fauconnier and Turner; Sweetser) may be the cause or the result of a phraseological innovation. The present article describes and analyses this phenomenon based on modifying phraseological innovations in press headlines.
