This paper analyses Middle Polish names of card games. This field, which was a novelty in the sixteenthcentury Polish language, developed extremely fast, which was greatly influenced by foreign languages: German and French. This research was commenced in order to answer the question how Old Polish dealt with the excessive number of units of foreign origin, how its users strove to adapt the lexis.
It turned out that Poles often replaced foreign names of card games with Polish ones in the old times. They chose units implying analogous images with respect to foreign lexemes, if possible. Occasionally, they would also form language hybrids, that is contaminations of foreign and Polish words.
The prevalent method in this sketch is the analysis of the contexts where the words from the CARD GAMES semantic field were present. The semantic value of a word in a given period was inferred from the certifications of its usage in the dictionaries recording Old Polish. The discussions were enriched also by later, nineteenth-century, descriptions of card games the names of which were recorded in the Middle Polish period.
This paper brings observations of the spiritual world of the eighteenth-century participants of the Polish culture, which was reconstructed based on nearly 800 proverbs noted down from Nowy dykcjonarz (New dictionary) by M.A. Trotz. The analysis of the paroemias registered in the dictionary serves the purpose of reconstructing the community reflection about the world, about the attitude to moral principles and system of values, to beliefs, attitudes towards the God and people, to judgments about the style of life, art, language, law, etc.
Proverbs, which are the object of the discussions in this text, are evidence of the tradition and culture, where universal contents are coded, and a testimony of a given time – an epoch when they originated and the period when they formed the living substance of the Polish language, namely the second half of the 18th century.
Due to their cliché nature, proverbs are carriers of conventionalised, not seldom stereotypical, information and therefore they reflect the thinking patterns that are most established in the cultural code. Owing to that, the cultural message contained in these short, yet not seldom meaningful, texts is a valuable supplementation of the information coming from other textual, historical, cultural sources.
