Res Humanitariae

The article analyses the conscious use of the principle of ethnocentrism in the perception and understanding of Lithuanian vocabulary at the level of short-term education in courses in the Lithuanian language and culture. The use of the methods of analogy and association allowed users of East Slavic languages to identify shared and different characteristics with their native language. Common features include vocabulary with phonetic consonances, among which internationalisms make up a separate group. Various signs are associated with ‘false friends’ and diphthongs.

The aim of this article is to compare the leisure time of friends in different parts of the Vilnius area: a village, a town and the city. The study is based to a great extent on fieldwork, using the opportunities of semi-structured interviews. Comparing longer-term, travel-related forms of leisure, there are greater opportunities for such friends’ leisure time in the big town or city. Meanwhile, based on an analysis of short-term forms of friends’ leisure time, the article concludes that both in Soviet times and in recent years, there is no great difference between common leisure in different types of settlements. This is due to the short distance to Vilnius, the big city, of the areas studied. On the other hand, the leisure and entertainment infrastructure was created for tourism. These differences are further reduced by an increasing amount of free time being spent in cyberspace.

The article deals withan old handwritten text found in the book Logica parva, finalised in 1440 in Canea, a city of Crete (presently, Chania). After the overview of the versions of reading and translation proposed by Stephan Kessler and Stephen Mossman, and Ilja Lemeškin, all the words in the text, their spelling, and their interrelations are analysed and compared with the respective materials of all Baltic languages; the possibilities of different interpretation of the words and word combinations in the enigmatic text are looked for.

This article is the analysis of Jurgis Šaulys’s letters to Morta Zauniūtė which are held in the Vilnius University library. These letters represent a lot of new details on all of their lives, personalities and creations. This article discusses the impact J. Šaulys had on all of their lives by analysing their correspondence. This article shows initial stages of J. Šaulys life as a cultural figure who will eventually be viewed as one of the most influential organisators of the literary life of the beginning of the 20th century.

The research considers the features and requirements for legal language and plain language with the purpose to analyse legalese in the context of plain language as a means to ensure clear expert-to-layman communication. The findings based on the analysis of the text of the Treaty of Lisbon show that many typical lexical features of legal language cause vagueness and impede the reader’s perception. Nowadays, the use of legalese is not restricted to the legal profession any more. Therefore, recently the principles of plain language have started being applied to official documentation with the emphasis on precision, clarity of expression, avoidance of unnecessary details, etc. The ever-increasing demand for clear expert-to-layman communication naturally increased the demand for intralingual translation by applying plain language principles to legal language.

Well known established over many centuries and wandering in the culture of the archetypes associated with water. In the nineteenth century, which marked crisis of rationalism, we can distinguish archetype: water as the embodiment irrational. Accordingly, the antithesis of “rational-irrational” appears in literature and art through the contrast of images of earth and water. This binary reveals itself in the evolution of the leading art schools of romanticism and realism. Water, especially the sea, images prevail in romanticism, allow to realize its leading artistic and aesthetic ideas. Irrational element, the unpredictability embodied in the images of a stormy sea, the drama and the wrongness of fate – in the pictures of the shipwreck. Sea – infinity, the vastness of space, time, existence in General (J. Byron, U. Turner, T. Gericault, K. Friedrich, and others). In the era of establishing realistic, and then naturalism, with their interest in social existence of man, “water recedes”, giving place to land, the earth. In the image system, under the influence of materialistic tendencies and positivist cult of scientific knowledge, is dominated by the resistance, finiteness, definiteness. The earth is the center of matter, nature (E. Zola “Earth”). If the field of view of water falls, lush shimmering sea gives way to the calm water surface (“Barbizon painters”).

The article focuses on short-rooted infixal and sta stem verbs ending with sonants l, r, m, n, v, j which were attested in old Lithuanian scripts dating back to the 16–17st century and representing different written variants. The aforementioned verbs typically have a wide spectrum of constructional alternations. The morphological structure of verbs attested in the old scripts alternates similarly to those forms found in Lithuanian dialects, however, there are some notable differences as well, that is why the verbs found in old scripts are compared to those found in Lithuanian dialects and contemporary Lithuanian in order to determine the localization of alternating forms, their chronological and areal distribution as well as the tendencies and motives for their structural change.

The article is intended as a presentation and investigation of the historical terminology of traditional Lithuanian musical instruments, details of their construction, and their music-making features. The research material was collected after reviewing Lithuanian ethnomusicological literature from the end of the 19th century to the first decades of the 20th century, in order to find the earliest descriptions in the field of actual terminology. Most attention is paid to the historical works of Mikas Petrauskas (1873–1937), Pranas Puskunigis (1860–1946), Justinas Strimaitis (1895–1960), Mykolas Biržiška (1882–1922), Adolfas Sabaliauskas (1873–1950), and Teodoras Brazys (1870–1930). In this respect, traditional Lithuanian musical instruments are not studied in a systematic way, so the facts presented in this article supplement the work by the contemporary ethnomusicologists and ethno-instrumentologists Romualdas Apanavičius, Marija Baltrėnienė, Gaila Kirdienė, Vida Palubinskienė, Algirdas Vyžintas, Rūta Žarskienė, and others.

The article explores the rhetorical elocution of speeches given by the most famous American business leaders, seen from the point of view of persuasiveness. The aim of the research is to analyse the figurative expression of the speeches in question, to determine and generalise the most common elements of their rhetorical stylistics. Fifty speeches by American business leaders, given on various occasions in the period 1981 to 2020, were chosen and analysed for this article. The research is intended to reveal how various rhetorical figures used by contemporary orators serve as tools for persuasion and emotive argumentation.

The research explores the compatibility of syntactic characteristics of legal English and plain English. The paper analyses the competition of linguistic means of expression between plain English and legal English. To this end, the paper (1) explores the characteristics of legal writing and identifies syntactic features that cause comprehension problems; (2) analyses syntactic features and means of expression of plain English; (3) investigates the compatibility of the requirements for plain English with the characteristics of legal English. The research is based on the Treaty of Lisbon. The findings prove that although formal requirements for legal English are compatible with the requirements for plain English, there is a great difference between the means of expression of the two variations. Nevertheless, plain English principles allow appropriate user-friendly syntactic competitors for most complicated cases of syntax in legal writing.