Underestimation of hepatitis E virus seroprevalence in soldiers from the Polish Special Forces

No abstrac

Családnevek művelődéstörténeti és nyelvészeti tanúságtétele

The testimony of family names in linguistics and in cultural history     The paper presents the results of historical onomastic research surveying names related to the pupils who attended the grammar school in Szatmárnémeti (Romania) between 1807 and 1852. The observed lists of the relevant personal and place-names are considered here to be important sources for both linguistics and social sciences. Based on the birth places of the pupils, the school district of the educational institutions in Szatmár County can easily be identified. A comparison among surnames of Hungarian, Slavic, German and Romanian origin reveals the similarities in motivation and practice of giving family names among different nations. The surnames give the opportunity of observing folk migration across regions, sometimes even across the borders of Hungary. In connection with the origins of the surveyed family names, the author also discusses in detail such questions as the relation between language origin and identity; the consciousness of being Hungarian determined by the conceptions of “medieval statehood” and “noble nation”; and the process of folk assimilation

The meaning of the basic term for the colour black in Czech, Polish and Upper Sorbian

In European culture the colour black has quite a diverse and complex symbolism, which is also confirmed in the phrases containing black and referring to human life and the surrounding nature. This article is a comparative analysis of the meanings (figurative and literal) and connotations of the term “black” in three genetically close languages: Czech, Polish and Upper Sorbian. The comparative approach has brought out both the similarities in the conceptualization of this colour and its connotations, which are typical for two languages or only one. The semantic connotations of black in the analysed languages confirm their high compliance, which results from the linguistic and cultural proximity. The differences relate primarily to the wealth of expressions that implement the appropriate connotations. There is a visible lack of symmetry between Czech and Polish on the one hand, and Upper Sorbian on the other. In Upper Sorbian, as a minority language, one can also notice the influence of the German language (clichés of German expressions), which results from the closeness of Upper Sorbian with German

The language of students at the Sorbian Seminary in Prague and the Prague Serbowka

The Sorbian Seminary came into being in Prague at the beginning of the 18th century to educate Catholic clergymen. In 1846, the students at the Seminary founded the Serbowka association and began to keep journals as well as produce the handwritten Kwětki almanac. These two sources were used as the basis for an analysis of the language – to be more precise, of the lexicon – used by the members of the association. Pful’s dictionary, published in 1866, served as a point of reference for an analysis of the data collected. The juxtaposition of the language material gathered in the study enables us to observe a great degree of conformity between the lexis used by the Serbowka members and the vocabulary recorded by Pful. What is more, in the yearbooks of the Serbowka and in Pful’s dictionary we can notice a large proportion of loanwords from the Czech language, both older and more recent. This is connected with the attitude at that time towards the renascent language. In the lexicon of the Serbowka members the proportion of bohemisms (or interference from the Czech language) is much greater, which is a result of direct and close contact with the Czech language