An Eighteenth-Century Slovene version of Komensy's Animal Alphabet: Some Observations

Abstract

One of the treasures of the Narodna in Univerzitetna Knjiinica in Ljubljana is the trilingual dictionary, in two parts, Latin-German-Slovene and German-Slovene-Latin, compiled by Father Hippolytus of the Order of Friars Minor. 1 which for reasons that are not fully explained was returned by the printer and still remains in manuscript. with the exception of the title page and a few specimen pages which were set up in 1711.2 A possible cause of its failure could have been Hippolytus' decision to revise his Slovene orthography, bringing it into line with that advocated by Adam Bohoric. This entailed such a plethora of corrections as to make the text a printer's nightmare. On the other hand Anton Slodnjak suspected the Jesuits of opposition to the original publication in view of a prejudiced and unfavorable assessment of the dictionary by Martin Naglic, a Jesuit grammar-school teacher, in 1776. when a later proposal for publication was rejected. As one of a number of appendices to the dictionary Hippolytus included Latin. German and Slovene versions of one of the most popular and successful school textbooks of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, namely. Jan Amos KomenskY's Orb is sensualium pictus, a title frequently abbreviated to Orbis pictus or world in pictures.,,3 The first edition, published in Nuremberg in 1658, had parallel texts in Latin and German, enabling the classical language to be taught by the medium of the vernacular. The course consisted of a series of one hundred and fifty thematically arranged lessons designed to introduce the basic facts and vocabulary of each topic. One of the innovations in technique was the lavish use of illustrations, separate items in the woodcuts being numbered and identifiable by numbered words in the text. There are no illustrations in Hippolytus' manuscript, but this is not to say they would not have been incorporated in a printed version. In a preface to the 1658 edition Komensky himself emphasizes the advantages of his technique, claiming that the book provided an easier way to learn reading than anything known earlier. Of particular value, in his view. was the symbolical (alphabetum symbolicum) given at the start of the course, where each individual letter was accompanied by a picture of a living creature or natural phenomenon with which the sound could be associated. Simply by looking at the appropriate illustration the learner would recall the phonetic value of the letter. Hippolytus' manuscript presents the Latin, German and Slovene texts in three parallel columns. There is the same division into 150 thematic lessons, preceded by the same invitation from the teacher to the pupil and the same animal alphabet (vivum et vocale alpha be tum ). and followed by the same postscript in which the teacher compliments his young charge on acquiring a basic knowledge of the languages studied, and encourages him to read more widely. The lay-out of the parallel texts and the existence of numerous versions in other languages suggest that we have here a rich field for comparative lexical and other linguistic studies. The present article will compare Hippolytus' Slovene with four other versions of the animal alphabet and assess their relative pedagogical efficiency. In the preliminary meeting of teacher and pupil, the latter expresses his willingness to learn, whereupon he is told, First of all you must learn the simple sounds of which human speech is constituted, sounds which animals can make, your tongue can imitate and your hand can paint. Then we shall go out into the world and inspect all things. Here you have