PORADNIK JĘZYKOWY

ISSUE 4 / 2019

ARTICLES AND DISSERTATIONS

  • Rafał Zarębski : Polish-French bilingualism from the diachronic perspective – the state of the research and research postulates.
    This paper discusses the current state of research on Polish-French contacts and Polish-French bilingualism. It describes examples of language contacts reflected in nonliterary texts from various periods in the history of Polish written by bilinguals (both those for whom Polish was the first language and French – the second one, and those for whom Polish was the second language). The study presents also the following research postulates: to cover the most extensive (also in chronological terms) corpus of texts documenting Polish-French and French-Polish bilingualism possible by the research, to analyse bilingual speech of individuals with an average feel for language and not too high language awareness, to include the instances of French-Polish bilingualism where French was the first language, which have been ignored to date.
  • Ewa Woźniak : Diaries as a source of the history of Polish in the interwar period.
    This paper argues that it is necessary to extend the source base used in the research on the history of language focusing on the interwar period by e.g. autobiographical texts. Diaries of some representatives of the political elite of that time (Julian Nowak, Jan Jacyna and Maciej Rataj), subjected to study-related excerption, proved to be a valuable source enabling the layer of unofficial vocabulary of the political life in the reborn Polish state to be revealed. The analysis covered the lexis describing the organisation and functioning in the new reality of the legislature and executive. The collected material is evidence of the modern character of this nomenclature, which has been continued in the contemporary political discourse. According to the author, it is an argument confirming the thesis on the groundbreaking nature of the changes in the lexical resource of the Polish language after the country regained its independence, which also encourages the acknowledgement that the interwar period was the beginning of the new era in periodising the history of Polish.
  • Radosław Pawelec : How to name you will only know the one who has lost you – a thing on niepodległość (independence).
    Until the end of the 18th century, the word niepodległy (independent) was rarely used in Polish and had a slightly different meaning than it has today. The semantic change occurs after the loss of independence, which is also the period when the noun niepodległość (independence), which refers to the political independence of a state, comes into use. Old and new semantic elements are present in both words over successive decades of the 19th century as the development process of a new meaning is quick: it takes one generation. Axiological phenomena are equally dynamic; in the romanticists’ world of values independence is ranked very high. Its devaluation, which can be noticed in some utterances and statements from the past three decades, is a slow process and it does not seen to influence the semantics of the word or its functioning in the language.
  • Beata Raszewska-Żurek : Obyczaj (a custom) in the Old and Middle Polish period. An attempt to reconstruct the old undrestanding of values.
    This paper is dedicated to analysing valuation methods associated with the social concept OBYCZAJ (CUSTOM) in the Old and Middle Polish periods. The records where the main exponent of the concept, the lexeme obyczaj, is valuated in terms of morality. Such a valuation is manifested in various manners: the occurrence of the lexeme obyczaj in contexts shared with the names of other values, the existence of derivatives that are positively marked in terms of axiology and an antonym together with negatively marked derivatives, and finally, attachment of evaluative epithets to obyczaj. The initial three valuation manners show that obyczaj was perceived as a name of a value, yet the abundance of negatively market epithets (along with many positive ones) undermines such a conclusion. It seems that obyczaj was presented in Old and Medium Polish texts as a model value on the one hand, and as its realisation in practical behaviours, in which case it was characterised by axiological ambivalence, on the other hand. Old social concepts were particularly susceptible to evaluation in ethical terms and were often considered as values albeit at times unobvious ones.
  • Stanisław Dubisz : On table manners.
    The festive custom and culinary vocabulary are two components of the Polish culture which have undergone intensive transformations. Originally, in the Old Polish period, the lexical field of this vocabulary covered between one and two hundred units, in the Middle Polish period – a few hundred units, and nowadays – a few thousand units. At the same time, both lexis and customs have been subject to continuous internationalisation processes, which have intensified in particular over the past two hundred years. At present, native words constitute ca. 30% of the lexis falling into this field, and borrowings – ca. 50%. The vocabulary common to various variants of Polish (including ones with the Proto-Slavic and Old Polish origin) is strongly present in native lexis.
  • Paulina Michalska-Górecka : Names of followers of Islam in the 16th-century Polish.
    The aim of this paper is to discuss the names given to followers of Islam against the names given to followers of sects and other religions in the 16th century in the context of their origin and textual extension. Its material basis is Słownik polszczyzny XVI wieku (Dictionary of the 16thcentury Polish), both the elaborated volumes of the lexicon and the material from the index. There are 16 names referring to followers of Islam recorded there: alkoranista, beserman, bezermaniec, białogłowiec, bisurmaniec, bisurmanin, bursoman, mahomet, mahometan, mahometczyk, mahometysta, missurmanin, musulman, nowoobrzezaniec, turczyn, turek. The number arises, on the one hand, from the political and religious situation of that time and hence, from the topicality of the issue, and on the other hand, from the phonic acquisition of foreign lexemes, which usually came to Polish indirectly, through medium languages. The analysis of the material shows that the names were coined according to four patterns, which are analogous to those applied when creating other denominations. Their fates in the Polish language varied: some turned out to be ephemera coined by a given author, and the use of others went beyond the 16th century.

POLISH GRAMMAR

  • Anna Jaworska : Gramatyka języka polskiego (Polish grammar) by Tadeusz Lehr--Spławiński and Roman Kubiński.

REVIEWS

  • Marta Chojnacka, Dagmara Banasiak : Krystyna Waszakowa, Kognitywnokomunikacyjne aspekty słowotwórstwa. Wybrane zagadnienia opisu derywacji w języku polskim (Cognitive and communication aspects of word formation. Selected issues in the description of derivation in Polish), Warszawa 2017.
  • Anna Piotrowicz : Dorota Ochmann, Renata Przybylska (eds), Powiedziane po krakowsku. Słownik regionalizmów krakowskich (Said in the Kraków dialect. A dictionary of Kraków regionalisms), Kraków 2017
  • Małgorzata B. Majewska : Jacek Pleciński, Dictionnaire français et polonais des faux amis du traducteur. Francuski i polski słownik fałszywych przyjaciół tłumacza (French and Polish dictionary of false friends of a translator), Wrocław 2016.

EXPLANATIONS OF WORDS AND EXPRESSIONS