ACTA LINGUISTICA LITHUANICA

LIETUVIŲ KALBOTYROS KLAUSIMAI XLIII (2000)

Reviews. Book reviews. Notes. Opinions. Reviews. Observations Überblicke. Rezensionen. Anmerkungen

Acta baltico-slavica / Archeologia, historia, ethnographia et linguarum scientia/ XXIII. Polish Academy of Sciences, Institute of Slavic Studies. Warsaw: Slavic Publishing Centre, 1996, 260 pp.

Fig. 1. Acta baltico-slavica cover of volume 23

A few years ago, volume 23 of the periodical Acta baltico-slavica was published in Warsaw. Both linguists and various cultural researchers will find in it interesting linguistic and historical material relating to Lithuania and its closest neighbours. The editorial board’s composition is suitably broad: Warsaw linguists and historians I. Grek-Pabisowa /managing editor/, Aleksander Gieysztor, Jan Jaskanis, Michal Kondratiuk, Piotr Losowski, Antonina Obrębska-Jabłońska, Jerzy Okulicz, the Poznań scholars Michal Hasiuk and Tadeusz Zdancewicz, the Kraków scholar Leszek Bednarczuk, the Minsk scholar Viktor Martynov, and the Vilnius scholar Vytautas Mažiulis.

183

Quite a few articles deal with the Lithuanian language. The volume opens with Lithuanian studies articles, the first two of which are written in German. In their article “Erweiterung und Kürzung von manchen Wörtern in den Mundarten der litauischen Sprachen” / “Lengthening and shortening of certain words in Lithuanian dialects,” Žaneta Markevičienė and Vladas Grinaveckis provide numerous examples, mainly from the Aukštaitian dialects, of words from various parts of speech in Lithuanian: pronouns aš and ašei, ašen, ašeai, ašeinos, tū and tūjei, tūjen, tūjeinos, mán and mánen, mánenai; numerals dù, dvi and dùjen, dùjenai, dùjeno, dùjaino, dvìen, dvìenai, dvìenos, dvìeino; verbs duóti and dúoten, dúotenai, dúotien, dúodienai, sùkti and sùkten, sùktenai, sùktien, sùktienai, éinai ‘goes’, sùkai ‘turns’, mylìai ‘loves’, tùrai ‘has’, rašydavai, rašydau ‘used to write’, sakýdavai ‘used to say’; adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and particles: aplink and aplinkui, aplinkai, aplinkais, aplinkó, aplinkos ap- linkós, aplinkuo, aplinkom, aplinkun, atgal/atgal and atgalì, atgalìais, atgalìos, atga- lion atgalion, atgalìonai, atgalìom, atgalìaus; dabar and dabarós, dabarčios, dabarčiaus, dabarčius, dabarčiai, dabarčiu, dabarškčiai, dabartės, dabartėlio, dabartėlios, da- bartėlės, dabarstė, dabarštėlei, dabar̃gu alongside the shortened forms dár, dar, as well as ar and à dár and dá, vėl and vė, kodėl and kodė, todėl and todė, kõl, šìol, tõl and kõlei, šiõlei tõlei, kõlia, šiõlia, tõlia, kõleik, šiõleik, tõleik, and so on.

In his article “Zu einem Fall des Infinitivgebrauchs in den Mundarten der litauischen Sprache” / “On one case of infinitive use in Lithuanian dialects,” V. Grinaveckis discusses the use of the infinitive characteristic mainly of western Lithuania: dūgnas matyti, namai matyti, nieko nematyti, varpai girdėti, gerai išmanyti, aiškiai jausti or jùsti. In eastern Lithuania, the third-person present reflexive form is most often used instead of the infinitive: dūgnas namai mátos(i), varpai gìrdis(i), and so on.

Most of the other articles are written in Polish. Also belonging to Lithuanian studies is an article by Roman Roszko, who speaks Lithuanian beautifully. Drawing on examples from the Punsk dialect, the author discusses various ways of expressing repeated actions, more precisely, the nuances of meaning of the frequentative past tense of verbs / būdavo, eidavo, rašydavo / and the simple past tense / buvo, ėjo, rašė, rašinėjo. In this work, the author confirms the view that the so-called frequentative past tense is merely one of the forms of the simple past tense.

One of Poland’s most prominent Balticists, Wojciech Smoczyński, examines variants of the parallel articles stess: steis in Old Prussian. Interpreting the written forms morphologically, the author argues that the article’s inflection is based on two stems, stes- and steis-, of which the diphthongal stem is an innovation arising from the opposition pluralis stei-: singularis ste-.

The Toruń linguist Jolanta Mędelska presents distinctive interjections and sound-imitative words of the cultural Polish language of the Vilnius region, used in the Polish-language press in Lithuania. A substantial number of these are Lithuanianisms, for example: am-am, au-au, apshi ‘apsik’, capt, ciu-ciu, čirkšt, čiuk, dzingul, ga-ga, gurkt, jukš, kar, op(a), paplak, pokšt, put-put, šast, šlep(t), štiš, tarkšt, zur(u), and so on.

184

The second article by this linguist is entitled “The Polish Cultural Dialect in Lithuania after World War II: the Language of the ‘Older Generation’ and the ‘Younger Generation.’” Here, too, drawing on the Polish press in Lithuania, the influence of Lithuanian and Russian on the Polish spoken locally is examined. It is stated that the speech of the older generation contains considerably more Belarusianisms. The speech of intellectuals of the younger generation is closer to the norm of standard Polish. This confirms the view of many researchers that Lithuanians in the southeastern borderlands first became Belarusianised and only later began to shift to Polish.

Warsaw linguists Malgorzata Ostrówka, Norbert Ostrowski, and Anna Zielińska discuss “The Current Polish Linguistic Situation in Latvia / in the Daugavpils Area /,” which is nowhere near comparable to the situation of Poles in Lithuania. In her article “From the Problems of Polish Education in Lithuania, 1993–1994,” M. Ostrówka notes that the number of Polish-language schools and Polish pupils in southeastern Lithuania has increased and their situation has improved.

In her first article, Wrocław-based Stefania Walasek presents historical information about a Belarusian gymnasium in Kleck, and in her second, about the fate of Belarusian- and Russian-language instruction at a private mathematics-focused (real) gymnasium in Novogrudok (1921–1927).

Riga philologist Boris Infantjevas, in his article “The Russian and the Pole in Latvian Songs,” provides many examples from folk songs, in which the lexemes krievs ‘Russian’, krieviņš ‘little Russian’, krieviete ‘Russian woman’, polis ‘Pole’, poliete ‘Polish woman’, and so on, are frequently mentioned. It is believed that references to Russians and Poles in songs form part of the historical legacy and reflect both their temporary or permanent presence in Latvian territory and their friendly or hostile contacts over many centuries, past and present.

A Warsaw-based Piotr Borawski’s article is devoted to the Tatars, who played the role of Cossacks in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

Minsk-based Svetlana Prochorova informs readers about the 11th International Congress of Slavists, held in Bratislava / Slovakia / from August 30 to September 8, 1993, and the “Slavo-Baltica” theme that predominated there.

In the Discussions and Polemics section, Vilnius-based Artūras Dubonis, in his article “Leitis in Lithuanian Society /13th–16th c./,” advances the idea that the leičiai mentioned in Lithuanian historical sources were one of the groups of peasants directly attached to the Grand Duke’s estate, his domain. However, the linguistic arguments presented below are not very convincing so far.

In the Reviews section, Jan Jurkiewicz reviews the third volume of “Old Lithuanian Literature,” Devynioliktan amžiun įžengus, Vilnius: Pradai, 1994.

The Chronicle section consists of articles commemorating the deaths of two distinguished Lithuanian linguists, Aleksander Vanagas and Vladas Grinaveckis, and one of the most distinguished Polish historians of Lithuania, Jerzy Ochmański. An account of A. Vanagas’s life, his most important works, and their significance was written by the deceased’s close friend, the Polish onomastician Michal Kondratiuk, while Vytautas Vit- shed light on V. Grinaveckis’s life and work.

185

kauskas, and the late scholar’s colleague Janas Jurkiewiczus gave a fine account of J. Ochmański’s scholarly career.

Aloyzas Vidugiris

Aloyzas VIDUGIRIS

Institute of the Lithuanian Language

Antakalnio g. 6

LT-2055 Vilnius, Lithuania

Received 2000 01 12

IN MEMORIAM TATJANA BULYGINA (1929–2000)

On April 19, 2000, Tatjana Bulygina (Shmeliova) died in Moscow after a serious illness. We have lost a distinguished researcher of the Lithuanian language and a sincere friend of our nation.

T. Bulygina was born on May 16, 1929, in Moscow. In 1951, she graduated with a specialization in English from Moscow University. Her closest fellow students were Russian scholars who later became famous and well known in Lithuania: the orientalist Tatjana Jelizarenkova, the Indo-Europeanist Viacheslav Ivanov, and Vladimir Toporov, who graduated that same year with a specialization in Slavic studies.

Under the supervision of Professor Michail Peterson, T. Bulygina wrote her candidate’s dissertation on constructions with the genitive in contemporary standard Lithuanian. She also published an article on the dissertation topic in “Questions of Lithuanian Linguistics” (1959, 2, pp. 90–108). After defending her dissertation in 1960, T. Bulygina devoted herself especially to questions in the theory of linguistics. In 1964, she published a study of the Prague Linguistic School (in: Osnovnye napravlenija strukturalizma. M., 1964, pp. 46–126). In 1968, her study addressing problems of grammatical oppositions appeared (in: Issledovanija po obščej teorii gramatiki. M., 1968, pp. 175–231). T. Bulygina’s work “The Morphological Structure of the Word in Contemporary Standard Lithuanian” (in: Morfologičeskaja struktura slova v indoevropejskich jazykach. M., 1970, pp. 7–70) is of particular importance to researchers of the Lithuanian language; in it, an attempt was made for the first time to describe the morphological structure of the Lithuanian word structurally.

In 1977, T. Bulygina’s most important work, “Problems in the Theory of Morphological Models” (Problemy teorii morfologičeskich modelej. M., 1977), was published as a separate book. In this work, the author chose Russian and Lithuanian as the principal linguistic material. In 1980, T. Bulygina was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philological Sciences for this work.

T. Bulygina published interesting articles on sentence semantics and semiotics. Together with her son Aleksej Shmeliov, she translated into Russian works on semiotics

186