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Focusing on the early Middle Ages, Majewski compares the literacy practices of European scribes with those of East Asian calligraphers. His analysis is based on the principles of the psychodynamics of handwriting, both alphabetic and ideographic. Majewski attempts to find the same principles in sources that discuss the psycho-physiological states related to the discussed literacy practices.
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The text raises theoretical issues of the ethnos and of the ethnic with a view to the еthnogenesis and ethnic consolidation prior to the industrial age: from prehistorical times to the Middle Ages. The first range of issues is related to content analysis of the ethnic, whereby the ethnic components are examined as being composed of ethnic nucleus and ethnic syntagma, and are presented on the basis of the example of the wedding rite. The principal parameters of the ethnic self-awareness are outlined, which is to be acquired through accelerated mastering of the ethnic specificities of the new community. The second range of issues refers to the ethnic processes. Based on a purely academic segmenting of the object of research, i.e., of the “ethnos/ethnic” system, it can be divided into two parts, each of which comprises in turn separate subsystems, components and elements. Each system is alive when it functions, i.e., when certain processes develop in it.
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The article deals with the Slavic words *gluxъ ‘deaf’, *glupъ ‘stupide’ and *glumъ, *gluma ‘idle talk, mockery; noise; amusement’. It is well known that the notions of ‘dumb’/‘deaf’ and ‘stupid’ are related in many languages. The author follows St. Mladenov’s view that these lexemes go back to IE *ghlew- ‘joy, frolic, joke, play’, but reconsiders it from the semantic point of view. According to her opinion the basic meaning of the root is ‘noise, rumble, rumbling sound’. This assumption is supported by OIcel. glymja ‘to resonate’ and MHG glumen ‘to resound, boom, rumble’. The root *ghlew- has undergone a specific semantic evolution in Slavic: ‘rumbling sound’ > ‘loud and incomprehensible speech; prattle, gibberish’ > ‘inability to speak, dumbness, dumb’. The primary sense of Common Slavic *gluma, *glumъ < IE *ghlow-m- is not ‘joke’ or ‘idle talk, vaunting’, but ‘incomprehensible speech, stammering’ from which evolved the meaning ‘unable to speak, dumb’, cf. S.Cr. glȗm, glúma, glúmo which signifies ‘deaf-and-dumb’.
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In this article prof. Hristo Matanov is writing about the role of fire and the usage of candles in human history and how they play general role in our development and evolution from Paleolithic era till nowadays and took their place in various religious rites.
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In 1891 Kuzman Shapkarev published three stories and a song from the town of Samokov that was dedicated to the destiny of the last Bulgarian Tsar Ivan Shishman – called by him King Ivan Shishman the Last. In the song recorded in Samokov region, appear both epinom King Ivan Shishman the Last and epinom Pasha Shishmanina, who is an antagonist of the king. It can be assumed that these two epinoms in the legends and songs recorded in Samokov region are a direct echo of the battles of King Ivan Shishman with the Ottomans in the late fourteenth century in Samokov Valley. Who is behind the vague epinom Pasha Shishmanina? Perhaps this is the son of King Ivan Shishman - Alexander, who after his father’s death became a governor of the province of Samsun in Asia Minor, and then in 1413 became a governor of Smyrna. In 1418 he died in a battle.
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The article discusses the question about the attitude of the Orthodox Church to illness as a sign of broken harmony between the human being and its Creator. Tracing the basic interpretations of bodily suffering in the Christian tradition – as a means of joining the passion of the Christ; as an instrument for the salvation of the human soul; as an evil caused by the Satan but made possible by God, the author comes to the conclusion that the attitude of the Christian theology to the sufferings of the body is ambivalent rather than treating it simply as an ‘ultimate evil’. She also traces the tradition of use of healing prayers in the period between the tenth and the twenty-first centuries as an always actual element of the Christian ritual practices. The text of the so called ‘Cyprian’s Prayers’ is analyzed, too. At the same time its place in the postmodern social context is also outlined.
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