elements of the modern Russian vocabulary. A valuable contribution to Russian, Slavic and Indo European linguistics, four books of the dictionary offers to its readers, linguists, historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and students of Russian, with a detailed and accurate knowledge of the origins of words, including modern colloquialisms, recent loanwords and dialectal forms. Vladimir Orel, PhD in Linguistics (1981), Russian Academy of Sciences, is a researcher in the field of Slavic and Indo European historical linguistics. He has published Hamito Semitic Etymological Dictionary (1995), The Language of Phrygians (1997), Albanian Etymological Dictionary (1998), The Concise Historical Grammar of Albanian (2000), and Handbook of Germanic Etymology (2003), as well as a number of articles in Russian, Slavic and Indo-European etymology. Dr. Orel passed away during the summer of 2007, leaving the fourth volume of the Russian Etymological Dictionary incomplete. His work was finished over the four years following his passing by his editorial team, and published by Theophania Publishing. Acknowledgements: In the spring and summer of 2007, Dr. Vladimir Orel worked simultaneously on Volumes Three and Four of this series, his Russian Etymological Dictionary, which he hoped to see published by December 2007. In late summer of that year, Dr. Orel suffered a massive stroke and passed away, leaving a son, two daughters, and many friends to mourn - and both volumes unfinished. Thanks to the superior skills of linguistic scholar Dr. Vitalij Shevoroshkin, Volume Three was quickly completed and published by the end of 2007. Volume Four was another story. Far less complete than its predecessor, the volume needed significant work to flesh out the entries begun by Dr. Orel. Again, Dr. Shevoroshkin’s skill and time were invaluable in completing the text in view of his own projects and international teaching. But more assistance and time were required. Several other very busy scholars lent their hands and minds to the Russian Etymological Dictionary’s completion. In particular, we would like to express our gratitude to A.Lehrman and B. Podolsky, without whose time and assistance this text would be a dusty, unfinished manuscript. For their assistance with this volume, we would also like to thank G. Barinova, V. Blažek, Zh. Varbot, L. Kasatin, L. Krysin, and L. Kulikov. Thanks to the work of the above scholars, Volume Four has been belatedly but successfully completed within the framework of Dr. Orel’s original plan and mindset.

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