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This article offers a methodological contribution to the complex relationship between the critical editing of Old Church Slavonic texts and their linguistic interpretation. It focuses in particular on the challenges of reconciling textual criticism with both the reconstruction of a text’s original form and the identification of its place of composition. Given the unique nature of these texts and their transmission across different regions, editors often face considerable difficulties in accounting for historical linguistic shifts and manuscript alterations while attempting to restore an original version (Urtext or archetype). The study examines specific complications that emerge when textual variation, scribal interventions or errors, and diachronic linguistic developments intersect in the editorial process. Through the analysis of concrete examples from texts of probable or possible Czech provenance, it explores the challenges of restoring texts shaped by transmission across different territories and historical periods. These issues, in turn, raise critical questions about the creation of comprehensive and reliable dictionaries based on such editions, or used to justify specific linguistic decisions. Together, these two dimensions of editorial work create a dual dilemma, one that is particularly difficult to resolve, as it requires balancing textual restoration through a stemma codicum with rigorous linguistic analysis.

The paper deals with the Second Old Church Slavonic Life of Saint Wenceslas and its Latin original, the so-called Gumpold’s legend. It arises from a detailed comparison between the Old Church Slavonic text and the Latin versions. It confirms and deepens the findings of the previous literature that approximately one-third of the Old Church Slavonic text was not translated from Gumpold’s legend, but from other extant Latin sources, especially the Czech redaction of Crescente fide, or it is based on the oral tradition or texts of nonextant legends. The Legenda Christiani should also be mentioned in this context, although the parallels between the Second Old Church Slavonic Life and this Latin legend are not as close as in the case of Crescente Fide. It can be assumed that Legenda Christiani and the Second Old Church Slavonic life had one common source. It is evident that the Old Church Slavonic translator worked with more than one hagiographic text, which resulted in both a stylistically and grammatically inconsistent Old Church Slavonic text. The frequency of apparent citations from at least two Latin Wenceslas legends, also stylistically very different, serves to contradict the hypothesis of the existence of the so-called Slavic Gumpold. The Second Old Church Slavonic Life of Saint Wenceslas is a very interesting text, which is at least partial proof of the intensive blending of Old Church Slavonic and Latin culture in the tenth and eleventh centuries in Přemyslid Bohemia.

Reflexive passives and impersonals are present in all modern Slavonic languages, but vary in their synchronic properties. The present paper analyses the diachronic developments that lead to this variation in Czech, Polish, and Russian and includes some background on Old Church Slavonic. It is shown how the former three languages reached their differing positions in a typological hierarchy of passive constructions, by stepwise reanalysis. The diachronic comparative approach furthermore demonstrates the interdependence/independence of some of the empirical features of reflexive passives and impersonals in Slavonic.

This paper analyses names for ‘violin’ in Bulgarian, examined against a Slavonic background. A broader approach has been taken to these names, because the article concerns not only the “classic” violin, but also the folk instruments (fiddles), which have different names in Bulgarian (and other Slavonic languages): цигулка, гъдулка, гусла, кемане, лаута, виолина, гънилка, виулица. These names are described from the semantic, derivational and etymological point of view. The noun цигулка, the basic name of ‘violin’, occurs only in Bulgarian and it is unknown in other Slavonic languages, although there are documented derivatives in SerboCroatian. The noun кемане ‘violin’, from Turkish, also occurs in Macedonian and SerboCroatian and other languages belonging to the Balkan league. The second part of the papers is devoted to the names for ‘violin’ in other Slavonic languages. Some names, extant only in some of the Slavonic languages, are derived from an onomatopoeic stem (Bulg. цигулка, Pol. skrzypce, EastSlavonic скрипка). Most of the Slavonic languages have a noun derived from gǫsli, a Common Slavic ancestor, but in some Slavonic languages (Czech, Slovak, and Sorabic) this word now means the classic violin, while in others it means ‘fiddle’ (comp. Pol. gęśle, Bulg. гусла), and in the Eastern Slavonic languages and Old Church Slavonic it means a ‘plucked string instrument’ ‘a kind of lute’. In SerboCroatian it means both the classic violin and primitive fiddle. Polabian has its own name form ‘violin’ gigléikia, which comes from German.

The paper provides evidence for a more articulated structure of the comparative as compared with the one in Bobaljik (2012). We propose to split up Bobaljik's CMPR head into two distinct heads, C1 and C2. Looking at Czech, Old Church Slavonic and English, we show that this proposal explains a range of facts about suppletion and allomorphy. A crucial ingredient of our analysis is the claim that adjectival roots are not a-categorial, but spell out adjectival functional structure. Specifically, we argue that adjectival roots come in various types, differing in the amount of functional structure they spell out. In order to correctly model the competition between roots, we further introduce a Faithfulness Restriction on Cyclic Override, which allows us to dispense with the Elsewhere Principle.

Examines the nature of the Normalization regime in Slovakia & its influence on post-1989 Slovak domestic policy. Discussion begins with a look at how Slovak society adjusted in the wake of the August 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia & compares the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia policies in the Czech region vs Slovakia. The sources of stability & legitimacy this so-called real socialism under Slovakia's conditions are identified, & the political, historical, & socioeconomic factors underlying the Slovak political oppositions weakness, particularly manifest in the dissident movement around Charter 77. Attention then turns to the impact of Normalization on Slovakia's development & on domestic policy after 1989, highlighting the impotency of anticommunism there. Figures, References. D. Edelman

The Slavic book is written in nearly thirty languages and three main scripts (Glagolitic, Latin, and Cyrillic). With some exceptions, the Slavic book developed within the Christian European tradition, mirroring the divide between two branches of Christianity – the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic. The chapter summarizes the history of the Slavic book from the ninth century to the present day, pointing at the most important trends in book production and book markets, drawing attention to the role of censorship, state control, and national revivals and highlighting the major treasures produced in the Slavic book world.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Slavic Languages and Contact Prehistoric Contact Finno‐Ugric Contact and the Finno‐Ugric Substrate in Russian Contact in the Early History of the Slavs Western European Languages and Slavic Slavic Languages in Contact Conclusion Notes References

Dziwirek traces the evolution of the argument structure of the verb uciti, which means \"to teach\", in eleven Slavic languages. She considers why Slavic uc-based verbs are so difficult for foreign language learners and linguists alike to learn.

Jan Ivar Bjornflaten describes how indeclinable verbal adverbs came to be formed, focusing on a period between the late 16th and mid- 17th centuries when the verbal adjectives from which they develop were in the process of losing grammatical agreement; Hakyung Jung traces the development of the North Russian ¿^-perfect from an originally passive construction to an active construction via a process of feature reduction in the u + genitive component; and Marija Lazar deals with the placement of the reflexive pronoun in Russian business writing of the 12th- 15th centuries, showing that the grammaticalization of the postverbal enclitic sja took place at different times in different regions. Mojmir Docekal uses a formal theory known as lambdabased categorial semantics (we owe this term to Professor Anita Steube of Leipzig University) to demonstrate that both Old Church Slavonic and Old Czech are strict negative concord languages, although the occurrence of -words without verbal negation in OCS remains unresolved.