Λογικὴ λατρεία (Rom 12,1). The Pauline Idea of Worship between the Hebrew and Hellenistic Worlds

This essay focuses on a passage from the Letter to the Romans, better on a famous expression: λογικὴ λατρεία (Rom 12,1). After having studied its context in some depth, it shows how Paul operates in a dual direction: the apostle removes from the expression any kind of semantic link bound up with the cult; he also attributes to it a profane semantic. Paul does not intend to oppose the two cults, Jewish and Christian. His words imply that, like the ancient Israel before them, the Christian believers should also be distinguished for their cult. Christian worship is conceived in a different way. It is far from being a spiritualisation of the cult. Such a reduction is excluded by the object of the sacrifice, «your bodies». Paul operates in two directions: on the one hand, he avoids the trap of supersessionism with regard to the Jewish cult; on the other hand, he excludes a spiritualisation (or interiorisation) of Greek religious practices. Paul’s language is distinct both from the great tradition of Israel and from the Hellenistic world.

Circular economy and reducing consumption from a decolonial approach

Reflection paper, which from the decolonial perspective, understood as the detachment of the westerners’ epistemologies, raises the alternative proposal of the Circular Economy (CE) and reducing consumption, in which compensation is claimed for the environmental damage generated by consumerism and the exploitation of natural resources in the past 30 years. The CE assumes the cyclical structure of nature, to generate a model for the use of ecosystem resources and to bring industrial production to the bare minimum by including the reuse of inputs that, due to their characteristics, should not return to the environment. The methodology used consisted of a conceptual review based on 30 documents published between 1990 and 2020. For the bibliographic search, academic databases were used. In addition, for the co-occurrence relationships by semantic link, the BibExcel software was used and, for the visualization of semantic communities, the Gephi program. It is concluded that strategies must be designed to strengthen the alternative proposal to reduce consumption, within the framework of globalized markets embedded in the guidelines of a circular economy.

Translation of Non-Equivalent Idioms (using English and Russian examples)

The author analyses possibilities of translating idioms that do not have corresponding equivalents in the target language. In addition to existing methods described in literature, he proposes translation by means of compensation within a narrow context. The substitute idiom should be chosen from the same phraseosemantic field, and thus, both semantic link to the original text and important stylistic level typical of idioms are preserved in the target text. The theory is demonstrated by examples of translation from English into Russian and vice versa.

„Tu wszystko ma insze imię”, czyli o zmianach semantycznych w polszczyźnie potomków polskich imigrantów w Brazylii

The object of this research are lexical semantic changes in Polish language spoken by descendants of Polish immigrants who live in a rural community in southern Brazil. The aim is to analyze the semantic changes which emerged as a result of language contact with Brazilian Portuguese and to state if there is a semantical motivation between the primary meaning (brought by the immigrants) and the new meaning of the lexemes. The data used for the research was extracted from interviews conducted with nineteen Polish descendants. In the data there were found 64 lexemes which underwent a contact-induced semantic change. In 83% of cases there is a semantic link between the primary and the new meaning, which proves that the contact-induced semantic change can be subject to similar mechanisms that result in semantic change within one language only. The mechanisms observed most frequently in the data are generalization and metaphorization.