Bøger i Empirie und Theorie der Sprachwissenschaft serien

The present volume is an alphabetically arranged lexicon of mythological terms of Baltic mythology. The terms are analyzed in their historical and ethnological context and in perspective of their etymology. They were preserved in numerous chronicles, usually written in non-Baltic languages, namely Latin, German, Old Russian, and Old Polish. Their second important source is hidden in Lithuanian and especially Latvian folk songs called 'dainas'.Portions of both primary texts and folklore are included within the individual entries. The recently formulated interpretations of Lithuanian and Latvian mythologists are also taken in account, to confront them with older opinions and with the results of etymological analysis. The proposed etymological explanations of the analyzed terms should serve to differentiate a common Indo-European heritage from the purely Baltic forms, and finally from external mutual interferences with Slavic, Iranian, Germanic and Fenno-Volgaic traditions.

The palaeography of the first Slavic script - the Glagolitic script - is being published in English language for the first time. Unlike former historiography-based palaeographic textbooks, this study is linguistically substantiated. After presenting the elemental historical and philological knowledge on the creation of the script and its relation to the parallel Slavic script - the Cyrillic - the author goes on to distinguish the development of those linguistically-based segments (e.g. graphemes) from the means that optimize the transfer of linguistic message through the visual writing system. The evolution of letter forms is being observed in the long process of minusculization. The coordination of letters in lines and the readjusting of their forms to the four line system turned out to be the 'spiritus movens' of the changes not only in the letter forms but in the script's entire visual appearance as well. At the focus of interest, there are the oldest Macedonian, Bulgarian, Czech and Croatian Glagolitic texts of the 10th and the 11th century.