The Serbian Language as Viewed by the East and the West: Synchrony, Diachrony, and Typology, edited by Ljudmila Popović and Motoki Nomachi is a collection of papers which were originally presented at the symposium on February 5th in 2014 at the Slavic-Euroasian Research Center of Hokkaido University. The authors analyze various examples of language contact and linguistic change in the history of the Serbian language with special attention to the cultural opposition of the East and West. In the last section, the results of contrastive analyses of Serbian and Japanese, Russian as well as other Slavic languages are presented. With regard to the topics discussed and high quality of all the studies (most authors are renowned linguists) the volume has a big value for contemporary Slavic linguistics.

This paper describes the characteristic lexicon in the Devic’ katastichos, the monastery book of the monastery Devic in the vicinity of the town of Srbica in Kosovo and Metohija. In this book, the priests wrote down the gifts that the believers gave them from 1762 to 1789. Based on the name of the believers, the names of the places from which they originated, their professions, based on the list of gifts to the monastery, the measurements determining the weight, volume or length of gifts, a clear picture can be formed about the dynamic life of Serbs in Kosovo and Metohija during the 18th century, as well as the active life of Devic Monastery, to which the gifts were donated by the Orthodox Serbs, and also by the Albanians. According to the 2011 census, there are no more Serbs in Srbica, and the Monastery Devic was damaged in both World Wars and was burned down in 1999 and 2004. The work is dedicated to the celebration of eight centuries of autocephality of Serbian Orthodox Church (1219–2019), and consequently the autonomy the Serbian education, science, art and the entire spiritual life of Serbs, whose origins are related specifically to Kosovo and Metohija.