The paper approaches an important issue of the phonological similarity of words, relevant for current research in phonotactics, word recognition, production and acquisition, by analyzing the data collected in an experiment in which 30 native speakers of Polish were asked to provide phonologically similar words to 80 nonwords. The study demonstrates that the uncovered patterns of phonological similarity (segment substitutions, deletions and additions, the use of bigrams, trigrams and quadrigrams, noncontiguous sounds and segment metathesis) go beyond the commonly employed concept of neighbourhood density and point to the need to revise the current approaches to phonological similarity of words. It is argued that the experimental results can be attributed to the considerably more complex phonotactic and morphological structure of Polish than English.

Tunisian Arabic, in addition to words inherited and borrowed from Arabic, has a considerable number of loanwords taken from such languages as Berber, Spanish, Italian, Turkish, French, and English. The main purpose of this paper is the inquiry into the words of French origin, since it is from French that Tunisian Arabic has borrowed a considerable amount of loanwords, a process that continues especially in the fields of technology, medicine, and internet communication. Although French loanwords have already been subjected to various and even detailed investigations, it does not seem that this problem has been sufficiently elucidated, in particular from a theoretical point of view. Several proposals for different approaches to French loanwords in Tunisian are offered here for consideration.

A subject of the paper Substantive Declension in Slavic Linguistic Atlas is based on an extensive field research of the Dialects of all Slavic languages. The territory of the research is delimited by the international Slavistic project Slavic Linguistic Atlas the database of which is formed by answers to 3400 questions within 853 localities of the overall Slavic territory. However, not all the forms of all the substantive paradigms are presented, but only the selected representative phenomena testifying to the natural constitutive processes of the national languages in connection with the phonetic changes proving the specifi c character of the linguistic development under the infl uence of a genetically homogeneous or heterogeneous environment and testifying to linguistic changes as results of intercultural, interlingual and probably also inter-confessional infl uences. The final part of the publication is oriented upon the constitutive processes of substantive declination in the Slavic macro-areas (South-Slavic, West-Slavic, and East-Slavic – and within them also in the particular Slavic languages) from the point of view of “otherness” and “foreignness”, i.e. from the point of view of the original and non-original grammatical endings in the particular declension types. The genuine basis of the transgression from the original domestic elements to the new ones gets manifested not only within the adaptation processes of the lexical level, but its basis is hidden in the long-term stabilization processes, in systemic changes by which the inner structure of the language, the area of the distribution of changes, and their impact upon the typological substance of the language are modified. By its interpretative character, the paper The Interpretation of Substantive Declension in Slavic Languages aims at integrating the genetic, areal as well as typological aspects of the investigated domain.

The objective of the paper is to use the model of Complexity Scales and Licensing (Cyran 2003, 2010) to account for the existence of two prosodic types: ‘syllable’ and ‘word’ languages (Auer 1993, Szczepaniak 2007), which roughly correspond to syllable-timed and stress-timed languages. We will postulate that these categories are not primitive and that many of their phonological characteristics can be derived from simpler mechanisms of licensing. It will be also argued that the phenomenon of contrast plays an important role in prosodic typology and may infl uence syllable structure. Languages use more marked syllabic confi gurations in order to optimise contrast expression. We will carry out an analysis on a simple hypothetical language in order to demonstrate the interdependence of syllabic complexity and the contrastive potential of a syllabic unit.

This study presents a potential solution to a long-standing question of the phonological representation of short diphthongs. Their mere existence in Old English, the West-Saxon dialect, in particular, has been a matter of great controversy among historical phonologists and beyond. Some attention has been paid to short diphthongs attested in Icelandic by structuralists and phoneticians. Additionally, glide emergence, where a short vowel is expected, seems to take place in the present- day Sursilvan dialect of the Romansh language. What these languages have in common is that diphthongs occur in specific contexts, namely, they are allowed before consonants that are marked by what might be defined as secondary articulation. In this paper, in order to account for the occurrence of short diphthongs in these contexts, I adopt a structural model of phonological representations whereby glide emergence is the result of the interplay between a weak, empty-headed onset and the preceding nucleus.

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.

The paper presents an analysis of the voicing of the phoneme /v/ in modern spoken Macedonian. The phoneme /v/ in the standard Macedonian language is classifi ed as a fricative, but some of its characteristics separate it from the other phonemes in this group. This is due to the fact that this phoneme was once a sonorant. In a part of the Macedonian dialects this phoneme is pronounced with marked voicing to this day. This phenomenon is then refl ected in the pronunciation of standard Macedonian. Our analysis is based on a selected corpus of examples that have been spoken by speakers from various dialect origins, in order to assess the any differences in pronouncing of the phoneme /v/ when placed in different phoneme contexts in the word.

Berber languages outside Mauritania have a number of different morphological classes of vowel-final and semivowel-final verbs (“final weak verbs”). The situation in Zenaga of Mauritania looks very different. In this article, the Zenaga reflexes of the non- Mauritanian weak verbs are compared by studying all relevant cognates. As a result, it proves possible to establish to what extent the main weak verb classes of non- Mauritanian Berber are reflected in Zenaga, and to what extent certain irregularities can be understood from Zenaga-internal developments.

My series “Some Berber Etymologies” is to gradually reveal the still unknown immense Afro-Asiatic heritage in the Berber lexical stock. The first part with some miscellaneous Berber etymologies was published back in 1996. Recently, I continued the series according to initial root consonants1 in course of my research for the volumes of the “Etymological Dictionary of Egyptian” (abbreviated as EDE, Leiden, since 1999, Brill)2 with a much more extensive lexicographical apparatus on the cognate Afro-Asiatic daughter languages. As for the present part, it greatly exploits the results of my ongoing work for the the fourth volume of EDE (analyzining the Eg. lexical stock with initial n-). The present part contains etymologies of Berber roots with initial *n- followed by dental stops. The numeration of the entries continues that of the preceding parts of this series. In order to spare room, I quote those well-attested and widespread lexical roots that appear common Berber, only through a few illustrative examples. The underlying regular consonant correspondences between Berber vs. Afro-Asiatic agree with those established by the Russian team of I.M. Diakonoff and summarized by A.Ju. Militarev (1991, 242–3).

The paper first gives a survey of all the etymologies proposed so far for the Greek term for „pyramid” within the Greek language and the Oriental languages. Then the elaboration of a wholly new suggestion is ventured on the basis of phonological criteria in the context of the supposed Late Egyptian source language.

The Jewish dialect of ʿĀna exhibits three synchronic vowel qualities for the prefix vowel in the prefix-conjugation of the first stem: a, ǝ, and u. While the latter vowel is an allophone of ǝ, the former two are independent phonemes. The existence of two phonemic prefix vowels, especially the vowel a, is intriguing in regional context since the reconstructed prefix vowel in qǝltu dialects is assumed to be *i. Therefore, this paper aims to outline the historical developments that led to this synchronic reality. It will argue that the prefix vowel a was borrowed from surrounding Bedouin dialects. As for the vowel ǝ, two hypotheses will be suggested to explain its existence: it either developed from the prefix vowel a in analogy to other cases of vowel raising, or it is simply a reflection of the older qǝltu prefix vowel. Regardless of which hypothesis we choose to follow, the assumed historical development has clearly not been finalised, resulting in synchronic free variation.

This article is a supplement to Nemeth (2015), in which the absolute and relative chronology of the 18th and 19th century Karaim sound changes was presented with the aim of reconstructing how Middle Western Karaim evolved into its two well-known Modern Western Karaim dialects. Most of the conclusions formulated in Nemeth (2015) are further confirmed in the present article, while a few have been slightly modified.