Volume 69, Issue 2 - Special Issue: New Insights into South Slavic Linguistics

This article is based on a case study of Slovene speakers in north-western Italy and their attitudes towards language use and policy. Although the legal protection and support for the development of minority, regional, and non-dominant languages in Europe have made a remarkable progress, minority language communities still face many serious challenges. On the one hand, the level of their respective legal protection is often not efficient enough. On the other hand, legal protection provides only formal conditions for language maintenance, which has nothing to do with motivation, proficiency, or improvement. Today, most minority speakers in Europe are allowed and encouraged to use their home language in the public; but the question is whether they are motivated to do so. By studying the speakers of Slovene in Italy, my aim is to point at importance of colloquial local and non-local ( koiné ) varieties in maintaining minority language and bilingualism.

This study highlights the language issue in Montenegro and demonstrates why language in the country represents an unstable and negotiable complex of values. First, it introduces some theoretical aspects that explain how a value can be attributed to a language. Second, it traces the circumstances under which Montenegro developed into an independent state after 1991, as well as the impact this had on the issue of language in the country. Third, the causes of fluid language identities are explained before focusing on an evaluation of the academic debate on the language issue. This debate has generated two antagonistic currents, and their respective value-driven principles are exemplified. The study concludes with an analysis of why the conflation of social opinion and scholarly viewpoints has resulted in Montenegro being the only country in the former Yugoslavia today where no causal relation between glottonym and ethnonym can be discerned.

In this contribution we deal with the presence of lexemes originating from the Italian language or its dialects in the articles in the Montenegrin literary magazine Zeta , which was published in Cetinje during the second half of 1885. Besides the Montenegrin authors, other writers using different variants of the Shtokavian dialect also published their works in this journal, in which the translations of nine foreign authors were printed as well. Our first goal is to determine the similarities and differences in the presence of Italianisms conditioned by the author’s origin. Considering the greater exposure of the language in Montenegro to the influence of Italian and its dialects, it can be assumed that the Italian lexical component might be more present in the articles by Montenegrin authors than in the literary works of those who used other variants of Shtokavian. In addition, we want to verify whether the type of literary text affected the presence of Italianisms, starting from the assumption that the lexicon of Italian origin is more widely present in prose works that deal with topics related to everyday life than in poetry or in texts of a professional nature. Finally, we aim to determine to what extent the Italian lexis registered in our corpus is present in the dictionaries of Italianisms in Montenegrin vernaculars, is it adapted in the same way, and whether it appears with the same meaning or tends to present certain meaning variations.

This paper seeks to determine the place of contemporary standard Croatian future II in the verbal system and to define its meaning more accurately. What applies to Standard Croatian is assumed to apply to the majority of Štokavian and Čakavian dialects as well. While the primary focus of this work is modern future II, some of its older meanings are mentioned briefly in Section 4. Modern Croatian future II is peculiar in several ways, due in part to its unclear place in the verbal system: some linguists treat it as a tense (i. e. as an indicative tense), others as a mood (i. e. as a non-indicative tense). This paper attempts to resolve that disagreement by comparing future II with future I in similar contexts. The difference between the two future forms is difficult to interpret as a difference between categories but, in any case, it is modal rather than temporal. In that sense, future II functions as an ‘oblique’ mood in relation to future I, which belongs to the indicative. Whereas future I refers to a future process anchored in the present, future II refers to one that is not. The anchoredness of a future process in the present is understood chiefly as a relatively concrete concept: one that increases the conviction that a process will be realised. The non-indicativity of future II is also corroborated by the situation in languages that use the subjunctive to express the future II meanings. Future II as an oblique mood, whether formed using the l- participle or the infinitive, is a logical consequence of its development from earlier indicative forms.

The development of literacy in Montenegrin society is a very reliable indicator of the state and level not only of the general culture and education, but also of the social culture. This lends immense significance to any work on improving the language culture in Montenegro in all of its diverse manifestations, as well as to the popularisation of the basic principles of good literacy. Orthography has an important place within the entire course of schooling in the Montenegrin language syllabus, and so it is very important to be developing and encouraging skills of linguistic expression among the student population, that is, perfecting their spoken and written use of language. In this paper we will deal with the normative aspect of students’ writing skills in the Montenegrin system of higher education. Our primary goal is to establish the quality of written expression and to highlight omissions in the application of orthographic knowledge of Montenegrin language to further contribute to the enhancement of functional knowledge associated with the orthographical culture of the student population in Montenegro. The sample consists of 100 first-year students from the Department for German Language and Literature of the Faculty of Philology and 100 students from the study programme for Translation (English/Russian and English/French group). Qualitative methodology was used to analyse the prevalence of certain types of mistakes in student tests, and comparative analysis of the tests was aimed at showing the degree of application of orthographical norms by students. It is nothing new that orthographical knowledge among students is not at a satisfactory level, and the results of this study confirm the hypothesis that the level of adoption of orthographical rules is not in line with the defined outcomes of the curriculum for Montenegrin language, as well as there being certain differences between students of different study programmes. Our analysis shows that one of the basic goals of the orthography of the Montenegrin language is not fully realised – the enabling of students to apply standard-level writing rules and the raising of students’ awareness of the importance of standard language norms. It is evident that students adopt orthographical rules that are fragmented and that orthographical principles are not viewed as a system, as evidenced by examples of the deviation from the norms.

One of the salient morphosyntactic features of the hypothesised Central European convergence area is allegedly a simple three-tense verb system (i. e. past, present, and future) without any formal and semantic distinction between the different past tense forms. The simplification of the originally more complex past tense system has been claimed to be contact-induced, which is mirrored in the loss of synthetic past tense forms in the linguistic history of German and Slavic. The article verifies the hypothesis according to which the loss of the preterit (i. e. a synthetic past tense form) in Upper German caused the disappearance of synthetic past tense forms, i. e. the aorist and the imperfect, in Slavic, more specifically Slovene. First, the process of the loss of the aorist and the imperfect in three medieval Slovene texts is presented, viz. the Freising Fragments (c. 972–1039), the Klagenfurt / Celovec or Rateče Manuscript (2nd half of the 14th century), and the Castelmonte / Stara Gora Manuscript (end of the 15th century). Second, the use of the preterit and the perfect in the Early New High German text Ain newes lied von den kraynneriſchen bauren (c. 1515) from the South Bavarian-Austrian speech territory, more precisely Lower Styria, is analysed. The historical linguistic analysis of the cited Slovene and German linguistic material (the latter originating from the Slovene linguistic area as well) shows that in medieval Slovene the aorist (and most probably the imperfect, too) was lost no later than by the end of the 15th century, while the formal and semantic distinction between the preterit on one hand and the perfect on the other is still preserved in Early New High German documented in the “Slovene-speaking lands” in the second decade of the 16th century. From these facts one cannot but conclude that the loss of synthetic past tense forms in Slovene could not have been influenced by (the demonstrably later) loss of the preterit in South Bavarian-Austrian German dialects, which were historically (and in some regions still are) in geographical and, consequently, sociolinguistic contact with Slovene.

The interpretation of prescription No 5 of the Old Church Slavic Folia medicinalia crucially depends on the reading of the two phrasemes otročęmь xoditъ and ne puštaetъ sę kry . In this paper, we present hitherto unnoticed evidence from East and West Slavic that confirms the earlier reading of otročęmь xoditъ as ‘is pregnant’. As for the second phraseme, we explore both a middle (‘blood does not release’) and a passive reading (‘blood is not let’). Invoking philological evidence from ancient and medieval sources, we conclude that both readings allow for plausible interpretations. We suggest that regardless of whether the middle or the passive reading is preferred, the purpose of prescription No 5 can be identified with providing cleansing of the female body during pregnancy. Finally, we discuss the ingredients occurring in the prescription. We conclude that existing identifications of the phytonym * osъtъ are problematic and suggest that the characteristics of the plant described in the prescriptions as well as the adjective attribute velikъi could provide clues for identifying it in future research.

Thanks to reforms of the enlightened absolutism the first Slovenian newspaper, Lublanske novice, was published in Ljubljana (Laibach) – besides Laibacher Zeitung , published in German – in the last decades of the 18th century and was founded by Valentin Vodnik. Both newspapers were the main transfer media for the Vienna Enlightenment, encompassing, among others, the beginnings of Slovenian linguistics and ‘pergodbe’. Their narratives focused on the fragments of secular prose, the ‘Bildung’ and humanitarian postulates and practices. Their representation, containing some cosmopolite accents, was deelitized, embodied into three-dimensional patriotism and, on the same occasion, as for the humanitarian topic, into utopian aspiration in social transgression. The narratives connect Enlightenment with ethnical and religious discourse, showing some ambiguities by interweaving gender stereotypes with the representation of the difference of Slovenian theatre and historiography and demonstrating cultural criticism along with pan-Slavism.

This article examines a corpus of ten preserved Dubrovnik comedies from the 17 th century, the so-called smješnice . The study of these smješnice draws on interpretation and classification of the comedy routine of the lazzi . The authors of these comedies adopted and adapted them under the direct or indirect influence of performance and the written traces of the commedia dell’arte performances. The physical features of the lazzi , especially the acrobatic, mime and mimetic elements, necessitate a thorough investigation of the performance features of these comedies.