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This is a proposal to add several Cyrillic characters to the international character encoding standard Unicode. These additions were published in Unicode Standard version 5.1 in March 2008. This proposal includes characters used for various communities, including a number of non-Slavic minority languages (Mordvin, Kurdish, Aleut, Chuvash, and Abkhaz). It also includes additions for early Slavic philology and linguistics and for ecclesiastical works.

Then, several pages later (p. 206), Hinkova notes, "The USA firmly supports the European orientation of the six Balkan states and perceives their EU accession as a condition for stability and democracy." The precondition of the temporal sequence "first NATO, then EU" continues in the case of the Western Balkan countries. The second part is represented by three studies aiming at a global analysis of the area from the perspective of EU enlargement, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and relations with Russia. [Extracted from the article]

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The paper updates and adds new data regarding the situation of the reconstructable Pre-Indo-European root *OR-, *UR-, also suggested as probable in the case of some previously analysed place-names, Vrbas and Varna, possibly also in Warszawa. This time, the focus is on Romanian oraș, dialectal also uraș ‘township' and uriaș ‘giant, very big', obviously related to a series of place names like Orșova, Oradea and others, in their turn reflecting the ancient Thracian forms attested as ora, oros, oron in a series of Thracian place names like Al-oros, Az-oros, El-oros, Gaz-oros, Thest-oros, Milk-oros, Tarp-oron, Clev-ora, Cap-ora, also in the case of the river name Ordessos, with a probable real pronunciation *ordeʃ (ordeš). In the light of this comparative analysis, the current hypothesis, largely spread among linguists, that Rom. oraș is a borrowing from Hung. város ‘township' cannot be held for valid, as there are several undocumented phonetic evolutions and, equally important, the relationship of these forms has been ignored, including the obvious relationship oraș/uraș ~ uriaș/oriaș, the latter being a usual term of the Romanian tales. Hung. vár ‘a fortress' reflects a borrowing from Rom. oara, now in place names only, while város is an internal evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims at clarifying some terms currently used in the scientific literature, for example, Thracology, ‘Dacology', Balkan Studies (‘balkanistika’), the much used Balkansprachbund or Union Linguistique Balkanique, but also terms like thracomania or dacomania, which initially skipped unnoticed into the accepted terminology, and which have become aggressively used over the last decades. While discussing some specific examples and some etymological explanations, this paper tries to point out the good and the bad in the field of Thracian Studies, the scientific and the ideological (read: political) approaches, which cannot be avoided in a serious approach to the topic. We are closer to a better understanding of the Thracian heritage and the role of Thracian in both the ancient world and the making of early Medieval Europe, mainly the mid-first millennium C.E. and beyond. Some brief notes on ‘ethnicity' are are also added. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]