Tunisian women folk songs have not found themselves among those subject matters enjoying a large amount of interest on the part of scholars, although attitudes in academic circles towards this area of folklore differ. Recently, however, a gradual increase of interest in folk songs can be noticed. Researchers have become aware of the importance of exploring folk songs both with respect to their contents and language. Hopefully this will lead to an increase in scholarly research in this field.
The author defends the thesis that language is an attribute of a nation and as such it is offi cially protected by the international legal system irrespective of the number of its speakers; thus, there is no such phenomenon as a “little language”. Linguistic minorities speak their mother languages or some dialectal variants of those languages
The present article introduces a new approach to the Old Russian texts by revealing metrical patterns underlying seemingly prose texts of the chronicle Povest vremennykh let. These patterns proved to be a shared feature of Eastern Slavic oral epic traditions. Thus, ideas of Ivan Franko about metrical character of the chronicles and Ivan Nikiforov’s claim about metrical affi nities of Eastern Slavic epic traditions are developed and enriched by up to date linguistic as well as ethnomusicological observations. Metrical affi nities of certain fragments of the chronicle Povest vremennykh let and Eastern Slavic epic give new clues to the possible persistence of oral epic in written form and consequently broaden the range of Old Russian texts that can be regarded as epic. Poetical epic corpus, enlarged in this way, gives a new relevant context to Slovo o polku Igoreve, authenticity of which can be proven now with more certainty on the basis of metrical affi nities with the fragments of chronicle of presumably oral origin.
The officials behind the Soviet onomasticon development campaign chose desktop calendars, a publicly available and widely circulated printed medium, to serve as a vehicle for the propagation of the new revolutionary anthroponomy. The paper looks into the masculine names recommended for general use by Universal Desktop Calendars issued by the State Publishing House in 1924–29. Mimicking the Russian Orthodox Church Calendars, its editors proposed their readers from up to six (in 1924–1926) to three (in 1927–1929) masculine names for each day. Based on a comprehensive analysis of the total body of the existing calendar material, the paper proceeds to classify the proper names by their actual source, including: Orthodox Church calendars, Catholic canons, antique mythology, later world literature and folklore sources, celebrated names of the past, toponyms, the Slavic name corpus, and, of course, ideologized sovietisms. The general picture of the sovietisized name list is accompanied with a description of its five-year dynamics refl ecting annually introduced modifications.
Here is an analysis of the tale of the marriage of al-Hadhād (of the Himiar royal dynasty) with a woman of jinn found in Arabic sources dated from the 9th to 12th centuries. In the light of archaeological data and other folklore sources collected by scholars in the last 60 years (Serjeant, Daum, Rodionof), this tale could be interpreted as a foundation myth, with its strong anthropological and political implications, for the community of Maʾrib, the capital city and the main site of Sabaic religiousness in pre-Islamic times. It could also provide some keys of interpretation of a more general religious sensitivity in Arabia encompassing polytheistic or monotheistic creeds.
In the first part of this article the author suggests a new etymology for the East Slavic adjective horošiĭ ʻgoodʼ (in Old Russian ʻbeautifulʼ) – from IE *ker(ə)- ʻburn, blazeʼ extended by the determinative -s-: richly attested *kor-s- > Proto Slavonic *xor-x- (> *xoršьjь) with the affective x-, like many other words. As proposed by many scholars, one of the variants of this root is present in Slavonic *krasa ʻbeautyʼ that corresponds to the original meaning of the adjective horošiĭ. The determinative -s- is commonly used for extending the root *ker(ə)-. The second part deals with three proper names in the (Old) Russian mythology and folklore that come, in the author’s opinion, from Iranic languages. The analysis of the early Old Russian written sources (The Ostromir’s Gospel and chronicles) allows to approve that the original form of the theonym Xors was Xorŭsŭ coming from the genitive form of the Iranian word for ‘sun’ in the truncated compound name (most likely, ‘son of the sun’ as a name of the deity of sunrise). The name of the tale bird Mogoveĭ/Magoveĭ corresponds to Avestan (Gath.) magavan-, adj. ‘belonging to the Zoroastrian community’, Old Indic maghá-van(t)- ‘generous; giver (also an epithet of Indra)’, Old Persian magav-, an adjective denoting a Median tribe whose representatives had got the rank of priests, ‘magic, magician’, Pāli maghavā, the name of Sakka. This name corresponds to another fairy bird name recorded on the same territory (in the basin of the Mezen, the region of Archangelsk) ‒ Vostrogot (Vostrogor) that continues Young Avestan a-srāvayaT.gāθā ‘not chanting the Gathas’; i.e., these two mythonyms form an opposition based on the semantic feature ‘initiated ‒ uninitiated (into the Zoroastrian doctrine and ritual)’.