In Old Polish texts as well as in later works written in the Old Polish style (e.g. in the Trilogy by H. Sienkiewicz), the name bachmat was used to describe a horse of the Tatar breed, characterized by its small size but incredible endurance. An analogous term ( бахматъ) can be found in the literature of Old Rus’. There is no doubt that it is an orientalism, which entered into both the Old Russsian language and – through it or independently – the Polish language and here from one of the Tatar dialects. Among the explanations for its etymology, the most interesting seems one connecting it with the term Бохмитъ, i.e., a variant of Muhammad’s name, characteristic for the literature of Old Rus’. The article aims to determine when the term бахматъ could have entered the literature of Old Rus’, how widespread it was, in what contexts it appeared, and whether it is possible to show a connection between the studied

The article presents the achievements of professor Aleksandra Cieślikowa in the field of word-formation of proper names. The most important issues concerning the creation of anthroponyms in the Old Polish era selected from monographs and scientific articles are detailed. These issues include the problems of motivation in onomastic word-formation, the onimization process and the way of describing non-derivatized words by word formation and the participation of paradigmatic derivation in the emergence of Old Polish personal names. The views of Aleksandra Cieślikowa regarding Old Polish anthroponymy contributed to the development of onomastic word-formation, an integral part of the grammar of proper names and gave methodological foundations for the description of Old Polish personal names from a synchronic perspective.

An essay comparing Jan Kochanowski’s epigram Do Anny simultaneously with Sappho’s famous fr. 31 Voigt, which is preserved in Pseudo-Longinus’ De sublimitate, and Catullus 51 ( Ille mi par esse). An attempt is made to ascertain the exact debt of Kochanowski’s epigram to both poems.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the meaning of the Old Polish lexeme gędźba, which was inherited from the Proto‑Slavic * gǫdьba against the background of its equivalents in Old Bohemian and Old Russian. The inspiration was the text of prof. W. Boryś on the Proto‑Slavic musical vocabulary. Semantic analysis has shown that in Old Polish, Old Bohemian and Old Russian languages, the continuants of the Proto‑Slavic * gǫdьba had a meaning limited to playing a specific type of instrument, as in Proto‑Slavic. So the words did not refer to the notion of music in the general sense, but only to a certain part of it. This testifies to the absence of a general notion of music in the Middle Ages in the Polish language area and is a continuation of the original Slavic state. But the old concept, which was called gędźba, had some characteristics that have been transfered to the later concept „music”, called a new word borrowed from the Latin.

The paper focuses on the Old Polish word kryłos, which was attested twice in court records from Przemyśl in the 15th century. Some existing hypotheses about the word origin and meaning are mentioned, although it has not been discussed before in a satisfactory way. A detailed study of the word’s etymology (concerning Old Ukrainian, Old Russian and Greek) and a precise analysis of the attestations enables us to determine its meaning, different from the meaning proposed in the Dictionary of Old Polish ( Słownik staropolski).

This is account of the first auction of rare magazines and newspapers organized at the Warsaw Academic Antiquarian Bookshop (Magazines and Newspapers) of the Publishing House Dom Książki in 1984. It offered over two thousand items, published in Poland and abroad, from the 18th until the 20th century.