Two cognate groups of appellatives appear in the West Germanic languages: OE. līra m. ‘muscle, soft parts of the body’, E. lire ‘fl esh, muscle, brawn’, MDu. liere f. ‘fleshy part of the leg, calf’ (< PGm. *līzán-) and MLG. liese ‘thin skin’, LG. liëse f. ‘layer of fat around the kidneys’ (< PGm. *lī́san-). The words under discussion straight forwardly derive from the Proto-Indo-European archetype *léh1is-on- (gen. sg. *leh1is-n-ós)m. ‘soft, fl eshy part of the body’, which is closely related to the Proto-Indo-European adjective *léh1isos (o-stem) ‘soft, lean (of meat)’, cf. Lith. líesas adj. ‘lean (of meat), thin, non-greasy, slim, skimmed, infertile’, Latv. liẽss adj. ‘lean (of meat), thin, non-greasy, slim, infertile (of soil)’, Gk. λεῖος adj. ‘level, smooth, rubbed, well-ground’. Other nouns derived from the same adjective fre-quently denote ‘soft organs (of the body)’ in Indo-European languages, e.g. Latv. liêsa f. ‘spleen’; Hitt. lēši n. ‘liver’; Arm. leard ‘liver’; Toch. A lyyā (pl.) ‘parts of the body’, Toch. B lyyāsa (pl.) ‘members (of the body)’ (< PIE. *leh1is-).

The Adûnaic (or Númenórean) language was spoken by the Dúnedain, i.e. the Númenoreans, who were “half-elven” humans in the world of Middle-Earth, created by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973). Their language contains numerous ele-ments of Elvish origin. Exact lexical correspondences between Adûnaic and Elvish languages (especially Quenya and Sindarin) seem to suggest that according to Tolkien’s idea the Adûnaic language represented a member of the Elvish language family in the linguistic world of Middle-Earth.

The paper discusses the primary and secondary endings of the Indo-European middle. It is suggested that, rather than being a local (Italo-Celtic) innovation, the r-endings of the middle voice represent a Proto-Indo-European archaism. Numerous middle forms containing the element -r- are found not only in the Tocharian languages, but also in most of the Anatolian languages attested in the second millennium BC (including Hittite, Palaic, Cuneiform Luvian and Hieroglyphic Luvian). Other Indo- European languages (including Greek and Indo-Iranian) display a zero marker, whereas the oldest Hittite texts attest the primitive feature -t-. The Old Hittite middle marker *-ti, it is claimed, was more archaic than its late variants *-ri as well as *-i. The original primary middle endings in non-Anatolian Indo-European should be reconstructed as follows: 1 sg. pres. *-mh2eŘi, 2 sg. *-sh2eŘi, 3 sg. *-toŘi, 1 pl. pres. *-mesdhh2oŘi, 2 pl. *-sdh(u)u̯ eŘi, 3 pl. *-ntoŘi for transitive verbs and 1 sg. *-h2e/oŘi, 2 sg. *-th2eŘi, 3 sg. *-oŘi, 1 pl. *-medhh2oŘi, 2 pl. *-dh(u)u̯ eŘi, 3 pl. *-roŘi for intransitive verbs. The Indo-European phoneme *Ř seems to be a refl ex of a Proto-Indo-European (i.e. Indo-Hittite) dental stop *Ď, probably identical with the Indo-European dental spirant *đ.

Rufinus, the author of erotic epigrams appearing in book 5 of the Palatine Anthology, remains a mysterious personage since scholars have divergent opinions on the period in which he lived. The article relates those discussions and analyses the contents and style of the poems, ten of which are translated here into Polish.

Five years ago Vasilis Orfanos published an excellent monograph on the Turkish lexical borrowings attested in the Cretan dialect of Modern Greek (Orfanos 2014). In this paper the present authors increase the number of the possible Cretan Turkisms, providing and explaining additional items not listed in Orfanos’s book.