Res Humanitariae

,,RES HUMANITARIAE“ XXVIII numeris pasižymi skelbiamų publikacijų įvairove, bet jo sandara ir turinys lieka ištikimas šio leidinio tradicijai. Straipsnių autoriai – įvairių Lietuvos ir užsienio universitetų mokslininkai, analizuojantys naujausias etninės kultūros, etnomuzikologijos, kalbotyros, literatūrologijos, istorijos temas.

The article is devoted to the historiographic analysis of French flute manuals of the 18th-19th centuries. The author has examined the technological and artistic principles of the formation of French flute didactics at different stages of historical development. The educational books by Jacques Hotteterre, Charles de Lusse, Benoit Tranquille Berbiguier, François Devienne, Antoine Hugot, Johann Wunderlich and other performer-educators have been investigated by using the comparative analyses. Theobald Boehm’s reform has been displayed in terms of its impact on flute playing technology. The author also has focused on the discussion about its use in the educational process at the Paris Conservatory.

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 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 goal of the article is to examine chronologically the specific nature of the Easter holiday in

The foundation of the Republic of Latvia in 1918 changed significantly ethnic relationships in the country. Ethnic Latvians became not only the numerical but also the political and cultural majority, and thereby the concept and status of ethnic minorities were created. This article examines the visibility of ethnic minorities in the newly established state, focusing on the case of the Archives of Latvian Folklore, founded in 1924, as one of the core institutions that strengthened national cultural values. The ‘folklore of other ethnicities’ category was introduced and discussed at the archive during the first years of its existence. Volunteer folklore collectors played an active role in the discussions, revealing the bottom-up aspects of the implementation of the archive’s policy. However, rather than pointing to the ethnic affiliation of the involved people, the archival records reflect more often the blurred linguistic boundaries in Latvian society.

Before the mid-20th century, the Jews in Žemaitija were the most numerous and economically and culturally significant minority, with close contacts with the Žemaitijans. The paper focuses on the stereotypical characteristics of Jews as reflected in Žemaitijan dialect texts from an ethnolinguistic point of view. The analysis of these characteristics provides knowledge about the evaluated nation from the perspective of the evaluating nation. The research into stereotypical images of Jews rests on the view that they consist of a specific set of certain common characteristics and traits, and an analysis of linguistic expression provides more detailed information about them. The research has revealed that the ethnic stereotype of Jewish people in Žemaitijan dialect texts is quite positive.

This article focuses on compound nouns and adjectives in the first dictionary by K. Sirvydis Promptuarium dictionum Polonicarum, Latinarum et Lituanicarum. The analysed compounds are firstly divided into groups according to the part of speech the constituents of the compound belong to, seeking to identify the most productive model of compounds in this 17th-century source. Moreover, attention is also paid to the relationship between elements of compound words and to rare compound words of indirect meaning. Finally, the use of Lithuanian compounds is compared to neighbouring Polish words, to clarify if Sirvydas tended to use mechanical translation.

The article focuses on problems of chronology and textual development in the Ruthenian translation of the Czech Lucidarius. This translation is known from five published and one unpublished Cyrillic manuscript copies written between the second quarter of the 16th and the early 19th century. A new explanation of the information contained in these manuscripts regarding the time of the translation and the dating of the Czech original is proposed. Particular attention is paid to establishing the initial structure and sequence of the texts in the Ruthenian translation, which reflect its non-extant Czech printed source.

This article addresses universal laws of the functioning of open systems involved in myth-oriented semiosis, categorisation and world-modelling. The paper focuses on isomorphic regularities occurring in irrational rationalisation and respective verbal phenomena. The outlined systemic and inter-systemic interactions are interpreted from the standpoint of M-logic methodology, semiotics, cognitive linguistics and cultural studies. The paper suggests formalised notations for logical construals, and demonstrates the cognitive premises of myth-oriented designations and the etymological reconstruction of a basic operator’s content.