A fragment from a very long poem “By Touch”

When the ordinary world is no more, Consciousness retreats into the last citadel – Linguistic Reality – There, Where with the word “hand” It is still possible To caress the word “cat,” With the word “God” – To tame the word “nonsense,” With the word “love” to go and soothe the dead.

Rimvydas Stankevičius

Dear Acta Linguistica Lituanica readers!

The journal’s 90th anniversary volume has been fortunate. A faithful servant of language, the talented poet Rimvydas Stankevičius, has presented several as-yet unpublished lines connected with words. I never thought that this gift, also bearing witness to fidelity to the native language, would prompt me once again to caress my own words and rejoice that the Samogitian dialect and my one and only native Lithuanian language coexist so harmoniously within me, although the German language I chose to study was a key not only to the poetry of R. M. Rilke, but also to the broader world of philosophy written in German or of the many unheard-of and unseen books translated into that language.

Why do scholars write and publish books, articles, and works of other genres and kinds, and read and translate difficult manuscripts? Curiosity, the desire to grasp the beginnings of many phenomena and events, and to publish them so that readers may understand that layers of written culture already existed before them, and that people hurried to preserve them for history. Often this may be called faithful service to history, or perhaps a support for a scholar’s life. It is difficult to say which side of science we see: the one that counts points, or the one without which life would lack coziness, the feeling of joy in discovery, and the awareness that we are waiting for peace to come. I always remember the moments when, having found in an archive the confirmation of one’s truth sought for so long, one could hardly describe one’s inner state. Scholarship helps give meaning to the past, present, and future, to feel warmth and peace regarding the future of one’s thoughts and their life with other people.

The 90th volume of the journal begins with a study of the Teutonic Order in Prussia. Using notarial signatures, anonymous writings are identified. The author, Dieter’is Heckmann’as, a highly experienced archivist, certainly conveys essential points concerning the problems of identification. Professor Marie-Luise’es Heckmann’s attention turns to even earlier written sources, to the 9th–10th centuries. The author presents an analysis of King Otono I’s manuscript. The volume contains many publications devoted to onomastics. The journal’s senior author, Jürgen’as Udolph’as, is hurrying to write, continuing his lifelong investigations into the name of the city of Leipcigo. The author, who possesses perhaps the largest personal onomastic card index, once again presents his insights into the origin of the name Leipcigo and its connection with the Germanic consonant shift. The origins of the oikonym Ginučiai are also examined. Attention is likewise devoted to the tendencies in giving Baltic names in emigration in the United Kingdom from 1991 to 2020. Such topics will probably become more frequent, although one would also like to hear about the faster return of emigrants to their Homeland, which ought to await its own people, because we are too small and must be strong. The young doctoral student Simonas Noreikis from the University of Helsinki discusses Finno-Ugric-origin hydronyms with the grand master of Lithuanian hydronymy, Aleksandru Vanagu, whose 90th anniversary we will commemorate this year. The volume once again discusses the dual number in the manuscript sermons of Jurgio Ambroziejaus, and returns to the image of Soviet Lithuania in the textual corpus of the ideological narrative of Modern Identity, since, in order to understand the present, one must also feel the strangeness of the past. The eyes of foreign authors turn to the universality of semantic dynamics from ‘body’ to ‘person’, ‘self’, and ‘soul’, and to the modulation of the semantic composition of quantitative indicators in English phrases. A study not yet encountered among us is an AIC study of the scale of English closed compounds (compound words). Thus, Ukrainian and German authors cast a glance at lingua franca. The final article is based on an associative experiment conducted by Ukrainian and Slovak authors, examining envy as a psychological and cognitive phenomenon in Ukrainian and Slovak linguistic consciousness. Thus, war is incapable of disrupting scholarly thought; no rejection or estrangement is felt. And what has been written and printed will not disappear without a trace. In the Insights section, Darius Antanavičius once again уточняет his hypothesis, published in the journal, concerning the year of Mikalojaus Daukšos’s death. The 90th Acta Linguistica Lithuanica volume also contains two reviews.

I do not know whether the journal’s anniversary Acta Linguistica Lithuanica volume will show the path of scholarly life, but I hope it will inspire thoughts and ideas and prevent us from drifting away from the world of scholarship. May the reflections that arise bring only joy and harmony of thought.

Wishing authors, readers, and reviewers to find what is best, editor-in-chief Grasil­da Blažienė

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Acta Linguistica Lithuanica XC