The experience of time passing , perceived both individually and as a group, being a psychological fact and contributing to complex cultural relations, determines historical knowledge (the interpretation of historical processes and definition of facts). We should remember, when we talk about the interpretation of time, understood as the assessment of historical facts, allowing for the integration of a given society around an idea, around va- lues constituting their cohesion and, to a considerable extent, determining its relations with the outer world, that it is always a product of social discourse, grinding views, a se- arch for such a vision of the futurę with which at least the groups most important to a community’s functioning would identify.The letter of John Paul II addressed to the nations of Poland and Ukrainę, in which the question of evaluating the tragic events in Volyn during World War II was brought up, is the subject of this analysis. The article attempts to answer the question (taking into consi- deration the complexity of the process shaping mutual neighbourly relations) how the Pope endeavours to attain his objective, which is to encourage Poles and Ukrainians to re- concile and to reject the past for the sake of tasks facing united Europę.The Pope’s letter is undoubtedly a speech realized with the use of lexical and stylistic means typical for religious language. At the same time, the analysis shows that certain elements of the letter are typical for the language of politics.The Pope’s text in the world of freedom and pluralism, where numerous political sub- jects make contact with society by means of varied language, escaping explicit assessment, is marked by an expressive, easily recognizable description of reality and ans- wers a common need (the Pope feels responsible for the word, and builds a speaker-reci- pient relationship in order for the reader to become the subject capable of creating the world), thus he is appreciated and noticeable in the world of mass culture.
The paper focuses on the documentary aspect of a letter as a speech genre. The corpus comprises the letters exchanged between Wisława Szymborska and Kornel Filipowicz, written between 1966 and 1985. The study aims toanalyse how the participants of the epistolary dialogue present historic and social issues, and to what extent a private letter may serve memory. The analysis proves that the topics in the texts revolve around every day and ordinary issues – important only for the correspondents. Historical facts and social affairs are reported selectively, always from the sender’s point of view, and in relation to the addressee and the circumstances. They are often expressed in a disguised form (by means of allusion, understatement, joke, irony) which is determined by two factors: the fear of censorship and the correspondents’ literary abilities and their similar personality traits. The data reveals that a letter – considered as one’s account of events and a secondary mnemonic genre – may serve memory onlyin some ways but not completely because it “remembers” the past in a relative and limited way.
The letter sent by Ayatollah Khomeini to Gorbachev seems to be important in modern Iranian historiography presenting Khomeini as an influential and prophet-like “father of the revolution”. The letter brings Khomeini’s personal insights into the situation of the Soviet Union offering to its leader Islam as the only solution for internal and external problems. The letter in fact may be consider an example or rather a product of Iranian political culture, an attempt to return to the global and finally as a Khomeini’s answer to history.
The article is devoted to Polish emigrants’ correspondence after the Second World War. The author indicates the lack of research on emigration epistolography although emigration letters are successively published. He also points to the most important areas of emigration correspondence research based on papers by Brigitte Diaz and by Paweł Rodak. First of all the author devotes attention to the textuality of these letters because in his opinion the most important function of these letters is a preservation of language outside of the country.
A Description of Joachim Lelewel’s Familial Language Concerning the Family Social Space (on the Basis of Letters to His Loved Ones)This article is a contribution to research on Joachim Lelewel’s familial language. The study is limited to a range of linguistic phenomena concerning the family social space, and considers the two-volume collection of his letters from many different places written in various periods of his life. The epistolary prose under examination reflects the language of nobility and intelligentsia circles of the first half of the nineteenth century, with its distinctly marked hierarchical structure of the family social space. Its exponents include family names (e.g. the names for kinship and family relations, maritonymics and patronymics, names used with reference to married couples), familial forms of address (with the conventional forms Pan/Pani ‘Sir/Madam’, Dobrodziej/Dobrodziejka/Dobrodziejstwo ‘Sir/ Madam/Sir and Madam’, lit. ‘benefactor/benefactress/benefactors’ in relation to the elderly), emotional colloquial vocabulary and unofficial anthroponyms. This use of familial language, characterised by infrequent use of personalised forms, belongs to marked informal register.Charakterystyka języka familijnego Joachima Lelewela dotyczącego społecznej przestrzeni rodziny (na podstawie listów do najbliższych)Niniejszy szkic stanowi przyczynek do poznania właściwości języka familijnego Joachima Lelewela. Charakterystyka ograniczona została do repertuaru zjawisk językowych dotyczących społecznej przestrzeni rodziny. Podstawę materiałową tworzy dwutomowy zbiór korespondencji pisanej z wielu miejsc pobytu w różnych okresach życia historyka. Badana proza epistolarna odzwierciedla język środowiska szlachecko-inteligenckiego pierwszej połowy XIX wieku, w którym wyraźnie zaznacza się zhierarchizowanie struktury przestrzeni społecznej rodziny, czego wykładnikami są nazwy rodzinne (m.in. nazwy pokrewieństwa i powinowactwa, marytonimika i patronimika, określenia par małżeńskich), familiarne adresatywy z konwencjonalnymi formułami Pan // Pani, Dobrodziej // Dobrodziejka // Dobrodziejstwo w stosunku do starszych, emocjonalną leksyką potoczną i nieoficjalnymi antroponimami. Realizacja języka familijnego, w którym ujawniają się nieliczne indywidualizmy, sytuuje się w obrębie rejestru nacechowanego języka potocznego.
The notion of epistolary discourse is understood in this paper as a communicative event reflected in the letter or other varieties of this genre in a specific sender and receiver model. The article presents some features of epistolary discourse with reference to the correspondence between Wisława Szymborska and Kornel Filipowicz. In the first part of the study, the author situates private letters in the discursive reality and introduces the participants of such kind of correspondence. Then, the interactive aspect of epistolary discourse is examined, specifically inner and outer dialogue. After that, the elements of direct dialogue are discussed, e.g. forms of address, forms of metatext and linguistic equivalents of gestures. From the data, it can be assumed that the letters in question contain the typical features of epistolary discourse. However, original and unconventional elements seem to be part of the letters as well (e.g. employing fictitious characters in the correspondence, creating collages, linguistic stylizations, etc.).
The aim of this paper is to present press column Readers’ letters through dialogical elements in texts of this column. We would like to show in which situations and with what objectives the authors of the letters refer to texts written before. Interdiscursive dialogic is used the most frequently but we have also found some examples of interlocutive dialogic. In this case, the author anticipates a possible answer from his interlocutor. The references to other letters serve as a background to show the opinions of the author. Often, he defies his predecessors’ opinions, but the opposition is not very outright and is frequently expressed by the concessive argumentative scheme : “Admittedly P but Q”. The second problem which we want to mention is the presence of interactive elements in readers’ letters. Authors use apostrophes (vocative forms), 2nd person forms of verbs, imperative verbs, 2nd person pronouns, possessive pronouns appropriated to the interlocutor, polite formulas typical for conversation. The specificity of readers’ letters shows some ambiguity between monologue and dialogue. We should also notice a great variety of texts in this column. In our corpus, we often find typical comments and even real letters. The form of the letter frequently depends on newspapers’ or magazine’s convention. Our text corpus contains about 100 examples of press column Readers’ letters from different French or Swiss newspapers and magazines (Tribune de Genève, L’Hebdo, La Recherche, Que choisir, L’Express, Femme actuelle, Causette).
The article deals with Adam Ziemianin’s epistolary poetry (bringing both the subject of letters and imitating their formal qualities), which is discussed as a collection of literary events. Such an interpretation draws attention to the performativity of this writing, that is, its causative function, which results in the actualization of the text through the reader’s personal experience. Therefore, the interpretation here takes into account not only Ziemianin’s poems, but also their popularity as songs performed by the group Stare Dobre Małżeństwo. The most important conclusion presented in this paper focuses on the paradoxes of epistolary poetry: the evocation of both presence and absence, synchrony and asynchrony, combining private with public, as well as merging the literary dimension with real existence. Most of these paradoxes are motivated by the desire to rescue love and overcome death, as indicated by the symbolism of the letter and the well – serving as life-giving mediators.
An analysis has been carried out of several dozen letters written between 13 August 1876 and 5 May 1890 by Roman Bniński (the father), addressed mainly to his son, Roman. The analysed letters allow us to gain some insight, no matter how minimal, into the father’s attitude towards his son, which is expected to shape his offspring. Not surprisingly, the correspondence reflects acceptance, cooperation, reasonable freedom and recognition of the child’s rights.In general, letters are a direct source presenting a family’s everyday life, relations between family members, family affinities and relations with neighbours, acquaintances and friends... This is all reflected in the letters written by Roman Bniński to his son. Like all direct written sources, the letters provide a new image of the landed gentry, which is confronted with its stereotypical images, mainly formed on the basis of Positivistic and Marxist literature.
The subject of the article is the issue of genre classification of the writings of Kazimierz Sarnecki, who was a permanent agent of the Deputy Chancellor of Lithuania Karol Stanisław Radziwiłł, at the court of Jan Sobieski III. Sarnecki’s main task was to obtain information about what was happening around the monarch — above all his state of health and all the other matters, even of the lowest importance. Incarrying out his assigned tasks, Sarnecki kept a diary which, at intervals of about a week, he sent to his principal along with a separate letter. In it, he reported on his own activities, answered questions, and supplemented information that he did not record in the diary. They were two separate texts written independently but he sent them in one package. He used two different names to describe them (diary and letter). Researchers of old Polish literature, however, were looking for a term that would allow Sarnecki’s entire preserved output to be given one name. Two such suggestions were made. The first of these comes from Janusz Woliński, the publisher of Sarnecki’s work, who called it a memoir. This is not a correct term because the work does not meet any of the elements of the memoir definition (Sarnecki does not focus the narrative on himself, his storytelling of the events is subordinate to a consistent pattern, there is also no time distance to the described matters). The author of the second is Alojzy Sajkowski. He created the term “epistolographic relation” because in the diary he saw an element subordinate to the letter accounts; he also noticed the similarity between the writings of Sarnecki and Jan Piotrowski, who kept a diary during the siege of Pskov (1581–1582) and from time to time rephrased subsequent parts, giving them a form of a letter which he then sent to his patron, Andrzej Opaliński. This term is not correct enough either. Sarnecki was not creating one work which combined elements of a diary and a letter but two separate works — a diary and a letter. Similarities with Piotrowski’s diary only go so far — Sarnecki did not rephrase anything, but sent “raw” material, and did not include the diary into the letter. That is why it is a better solution to use the names introduced by the author himself, because in this way we define the nature of his writing output most accurately.
The present study provides a further exploration of the role of Arabic letter visibility as a possible cause of the Optimal Viewing Position (OVP) effect. We used isolated connected and un-connected Arabic letters of different shapes (basic, initial, medial, final) placed at the center of fixation (Experiment 1) and at various possible positions in isolated presentation (Experiment 2). In order to investigate whether performance in the visual identification task is modulated by letter type, we presented each of the isolated connected and un-connected letter targets in each of the eleven stimulus positions across the array to produce a mean RT (ms) for each of the letter types. Using the initial fixation paradigm enabled us to compare reaction times with correctly identified letter targets appearing in the different possible positions. The findings of the present experiments demonstrated that visual letter recognition is influenced by: (i) the isolated letters’ type (connected, un-connected), as connected letters are easier to recognize than un-connected letters; (ii) isolated letters’ shape (basic, initial, medial, final), as medial and final are harder to recognize than basic and initial letter shapes; (iii) visual field, as reading rates were longer for letter stimuli that were presented in LVF compared to RVF; and (iv) eccentricity, as letter reading rates were correlated with their eccentric placement.
Polish texts in Cyrillic alphabet used by the speakers of the Polish dialect in the village of VershinaThe article analyzes Polish texts in Cyrillic alphabet used by the speakers of the Polish dialect in the village of Vershina, Bokhan Region near Irkutsk. The dialect was brought to Siberia by the Polish who moved there from the Dombrovsky coal basen in the aftermath of Pyotr Stolypin’s reforms. The dialect has retained the characteristic features of the southwestern variety of Polish until the present day.There two types of Cyrillic Polish texts in the Vershina dialect: handwritten songs performed by the local choir and religious texts in print. Some language peculiarities of the dialect can be found in the songs. The present paper provides a comparison of the differences in how the Polish speech sounds are rendered in song lyrics and in prayers. For example, in texts of prayers there are a variety of ways of writing the affricate ć, and some inconsistencies in the use of some of Cyrillic characters. Tексты, писанные «гражданкой», у поляков сибирской деревни ВершинаПредметом анализа в статье являются кириллические польские тексты, функционирующие у носителей польского диалекта деревни Вершина Боханского района Иркутской области. Этот островной польский говор появился в Сибири в результате переселения сюда поляков из Домбровского бассейна в ходе реформ П. Столыпина и до настоящего времени сохраняет особенности, свойственные говорам юго-западной Польши. У носителей польского диалекта представлены 2 вида польских текстов, написанных «гражданкой»: записи польских песен, исполняемых участниками местного хора и печатные литургические тексты. В записях песен отражены некоторые диалектные особенности местного польского говора. В статье сопоставляются способы передачи «гражданкой» польского языкового материала в записях песен и в текстах молитв. В частности, в текстах молитв отмечаются разнообразие способов передачи аффрикаты ć и случаи непоследовательного использования в них тех или иных кириллических букв.
In late antiquity, the Christian thinkers were not too much interested in the old age from the theoretical point of view. What made the old age for the classical thinkers a fault was – for the Christians – a life purpose since it highlighted the primacy of spirit. Jerome – an excellent expert on classic literature – many times touches upon the issue of the old age in his writings; however, he writes about it in the Christian vein, not in the light of the classical criteria.
In this article, I have focused on eight prose letters in “Zabawy Przyjemne i Pożyteczne”. The first two are by Franciszek Bieńkowski and concern the issue of good education – good treatment for people with lower social status. The next four letters are the correspondence of three great figures of the Renaissance: the Polish king Stefan Batory, his secretary and statesman Jan Zamoyski and the distinguished Italian humanist Antoni Muret. These letters, coming from the 16 th century and written in Latin, were translated by Józef Koblański in the 70s of the 18th century. The texts are examples of traditional epistolary art based on ancient principles. The seventh letter of unknown authorship compliments the reforms of the National Education Commission and polemizes with its opponents. The deliberate form of the letter used to promote a state educational institution and to argue with the critics of its reforms suggests that it is a letter falsified for the promotion of the social good of universal and unified education. The name of the addressee of the letter has not been specified what makes the correspondence general and illustrative in character. The last letter is basically a preface to the Polish edition of a well-known book of French doctor – Samuel Tissot. The book is entitled The Council for the People and concerns the principles of healthy living. The author of the letter – Grzegorz Piramowicz – enumerates the advantages of the book and the merits of her author and praises those who translated the book into Polish. The prose letters discussed in this article which were published in “Zabawy Przyjemne i Pożyteczne” present a large variety of themes and topics brought up in the periodical starting from current issues to the examples of early Enlightenment literature and culture.