Lower Sorbian Research Articles

Number in Sorbian with special reference to the dual

Abstract The first part of the paper discusses the interaction of number with gender, animacy, virility and case in Upper and Lower Sorbian as compared with the other Slavic languages. Different rankings of these features are found across Slavic and relative pertinence of the dual number is examined in relation to the rankings of nominal categories. The result of this comparison shows that dual preservation vs. loss cannot be accounted for in terms of these rankings in a straightforward way. The second part of the paper examines semantic and pragmatic properties of dual constructions in Upper Sorbian, which is in the process of losing the dual, in order to establish the conditioning factors of dual preservation vs. loss. It is shown that – apart from bound uses triggered by ‘two’ or ‘both’ – relative resistance to dual loss in Sorbian can be observed in distributive uses which distinguish two-member sets from any other kind of set.

(Un)articulated definiteness. Nominal determination in Sorbian: Moving from an articleless language to a language with articles?

Abstract Slavonic languages in general do not use articles to indicate (in)definiteness. The development of an article in some of them is the result of language contact. In the case of Sorbian the influence of German led to the use of the demonstrative pronoun ‘this’ and the numeral ‘one’ to indicate definiteness and indefiniteness, respectively. Originally the German system was copied almost without changes, but eventually specific rules developed, subject to phonotactic constraints and restricting the use of the article mainly to intratextual and pragmatic definiteness. The use of the article depended on the kind of text and language (spoken language, Bible translation and original texts, translations from German). Grammatical purism managed to eliminate the use of the article in today’s written variants as well as in most official uses of spoken Sorbian almost completely. In colloquial language and in the dialects, however, the article is very much alive but its use differs considerably from German. There are also differences between Upper and Lower Sorbian, the latter being closer to German usage.

Restrictive relative clauses in the Sorbian languages

Abstract This paper is an attempt to provide an overview of the typologically relevant features of restrictive relative clauses with a nominal head in Lower and Upper Sorbian. Its main concern are (1) the semantic distinction characteristic not only of Sorbian, but also of most other Slavonic languages between relative clauses where the head of the clause and its relativized counterpart are coreferential and those which merely indicate that the referent of the head of the clause has the same properties, represents the same type as the referent of its relativized counterpart, (2) the various relativizers used to express this distinction and (3) the relativization strategies as well as the degree of accessibility to relativization involved in each case.

Aspect forms and functions in Sorbian varieties

Abstract In this paper, we discuss different types of verbal aspect in three varieties of Sorbian, Standard Lower and Upper Sorbian and Colloquial Upper Sorbian. There are basically two formally differentiated aspect oppositions in Sorbian, the Slavic opposition of perfectivity, expressed by stem alternations (prefixation, suffixation and suppletion) and thus grammatically derivative, and the opposition of aorist and imperfect, expressed by inflection. These two types are, however, restricted in their distribution, as modern Lower Sorbian lacks the inflectional type completely, and Colloquial Upper Sorbian uses it only with auxiliaries, modal verbs and some verbs of speech. Even in Standard Upper Sorbian the independence of the two oppositions is rather relative, as only the second and third person singular have different endings for the two grammemes, whereas in all other persons formal differences between imperfect and aorist are expressed, if at all, only by stem alternations, dependent on the opposition between the imperfective and the perfective stem. Therefore, even in Standard Upper Sorbian we have a clear differentiation between perfective and imperfective only outside the synthetic past tense, e.g. in the analytic l‑past or in the future, while the imperfect is linked exclusively to the imperfective and the aorist to the perfective. While the functions of the stem-based aspect opposition are in the Standard languages of the common Slavic type, Colloquial Upper Sorbian has an idiosyncratic aspect type based functionally on an opposition of grammaticalized telicity. The reasons for the special characteristics of verbal aspect in the varieties of Sorbian in formal as well as in functional respect essentially go back to language contact with German. The ILA model of the interaction of the lexicon with aspect serves as a theoretical base for the following presentation.

Diachronic Slavonic syntax: Gradual changes in focus (review)

Reviewed by: Diachronic Slavonic syntax: Gradual changes in focus Mila Vulchanova Björn Hansen and Jasmina Grković-Major, eds. Diachronic Slavonic syntax: Gradual changes in focus. Munich: Sagner, 2010. 208 pp. [Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, 74.] This volume is symptomatic of a recent trend in grammar studies marked by a revived interest in diachronic research from a theoretical perspective. This trend has been visible in the initiative to arrange a forum for linguists working within language diachrony using a formal analytical framework (mostly generative), which came to be established as the Diachronic Generative Syntax Conference (with its 14th meeting in 2012). This kind of work has been supported by the creation and wide availability of numerous electronic resources such as historical corpora, large scale databases of manuscripts for the study of language history. While most recent research has focused on the history of Germanic and Romance languages, with few exceptions (e.g., the recent publication Development of language through the lens of formal linguistics, 2010) research on Slavic diachrony is still relatively limited, sporadic, and scattered. In this respect the current volume is a welcome resource for linguists interested in the development of Slavic languages. It is the result of the conference "Diachronic Syntax of the Slavonic Languages: Gradual changes in focus" held in Regensburg in late 2008 and contains many of the papers presented at that conference, duly reflecting the diversity of topics and ideas aired there. The main organizing idea of the volume is the assumption that the processes that lead to major and observable changes in language are marked by smaller, gradual, and often subtle, transitions, which sometimes even point to conflicting trends. While the contributions all address various aspects of Slavic language history, they reflect a number of theoretical approaches, from formal (generative) to Construction Grammar, language typology, and grammaticalization theory. The book includes 17 papers covering Russian, Czech, and Polish, as well as the almost extinct Ruthenian and Lower Sorbian. Thematically, four of the papers report results and analyze data obtained from language corpora (Bartels, Eckhoff and Haug, Krasovitsky et al., and Rabus), [End Page 299] two address negation (Dočekal and Veselinova). Other papers look at the development of verbal categories such as gerunds (Bjørnflaten) and the perfect (Jung), properties and constituents of nominal expressions (Karlík for a specific category of adjectives and Fried for adnominal participial adjectives), and clause-level categories, such as modal adverbs (Hansen), the syntax of perfect auxiliaries (Migdalski), predicative possession (McAnallen), and reflexive constructions (Lazar). Some papers address more general aspects of diachronic change, such as the grammaticalization of nominal paradigms (Rappaport), the driving forces in the history of Slavic syntax (Večerka), and transitivity and syntactic structure (Grković-Major). The papers that draw on corpus data all share a common theme: the ways in which data extracted from historical corpora may shed light on changes that have been under way or have become visible over shorter (from a diachronic perspective) segments of time (e.g., 50 to 100 years). In this respect, the paper by Krasovitsky, Baerman, Brown, Corbett, and Williams entitled "Morphosyntactic change in Russian: A corpus-based approach" is of particular interest for the topic of the volume. In this paper the authors trace gradual changes in predicate agreement in Russian over the past two centuries. The syntactic contexts included in the survey are base orders, where the subject phrase precedes the verb phrase, expletive (impersonal) structures, where oblique phrases occur in clause-initial position, and sentences where the predicate precedes the (logical) subject. In addition, the semantic nature of the referents is taken into consideration, and animate and inanimate phrases are reported separately in the statistical analyses. Based on data from a large corpus of literary works, the following intriguing generalizations emerge: a radical increase of plural agreement with conjoined NP subjects; a similar, even farther reaching, change for quantified expressions containing the lower numerals (dva 'two', tri 'three', and četyre 'four'), but a very different pattern in the case of nominal expressions quantified by higher numerals (such as pjat' 'five' and above and quantifiers such as neskol'ko 'several' and malo 'few'. These patterns can be explained by the nature of the quantity...

Korpora bedrohter Sprachen als eierlegende Wollmilchsau? Das Beispiel GENIE

The question of documentation is central to any work with corpora of threatened languages and has important consequences for the corpus structure. The 'Korpus für GEsprochenes NIEdersorbisch (engl.: Corpus for spoken Lower Sorbian)' (GENIE, www.coli.uni-saarland.de/genie/) is a case in point. GENIE focuses on spoken language. The corpus, made up of more than 60 hours of recordings, comprises a) recordings made by Sorbian Radio (1956–2006) with different forms of Lower Sorbian, b) dialect recordings from the Serbski kulturny archiw (engl.: Sorbian Culture Archive) (SKA) in Budysin/Bautzen (1951–1971), and c) new recordings, also of the dialect forms of Lower Sorbian (2005–2006). These data support the analysis of – the relationship of dialects to the standard form of Lower Sorbian (phonetic/phonological, diachronic/synchronic), – the relationship of spoken to written Sorbian, – the influence of German, – the development of idiolectal forms. The corpus is also of direct practical use in – theWITAJ project for the revitalization of Lower Sorbian, – decisions on codification (spelling, grammar). Problems for analysis stem from the eclectic nature of the recordings, the considerable variation in recording quality and in the lack of annotation. The talk discusses the perspectives for and the problems facing spoken corpora of threatened languages.

Korpora bedrohter Sprachen als eierlegende Wollmilchsau? Das Beispiel GENIE

The question of documentation is central to any work with corpora of threatened languages and has important consequences for the corpus structure. The 'Korpus für GEsprochenes NIEdersorbisch (engl.: Corpus for spoken Lower Sorbian)' (GENIE, www.coli.uni-saarland.de/genie/) is a case in point. GENIE focuses on spoken language. The corpus, made up of more than 60 hours of recordings, comprises a) recordings made by Sorbian Radio (1956–2006) with different forms of Lower Sorbian, b) dialect recordings from the Serbski kulturny archiw (engl.: Sorbian Culture Archive) (SKA) in Budysin/Bautzen (1951–1971), and c) new recordings, also of the dialect forms of Lower Sorbian (2005–2006). These data support the analysis of – the relationship of dialects to the standard form of Lower Sorbian (phonetic/phonological, diachronic/synchronic), – the relationship of spoken to written Sorbian, – the influence of German, – the development of idiolectal forms. The corpus is also of direct practical use in – theWITAJ project for the revitalization of Lower Sorbian, – decisions on codification (spelling, grammar). Problems for analysis stem from the eclectic nature of the recordings, the considerable variation in recording quality and in the lack of annotation. The talk discusses the perspectives for and the problems facing spoken corpora of threatened languages.

The Slavic Languages by Roland Sussex , Paul Cubberley (review)

SEER, Vol. 86,No. 3, July 2008 Reviews Sussex, Roland and Cubberley, Paul. The Slavic Languages. Cambridge Language Surveys. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2006. xix + 638 pp. Map. Tables. Figures. Appendices. Bibliography. Index. ?85.00. The authors nail their colours to themast right from the startof thisbook by declaring 'Slavic comprises 13 languages split into three groups: South Slav ic, which includes Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian. ..' (p. i), although many regard these three as variants of one language. Obviously political as well as linguistic criteria affect the choice. However, the authors take a thoroughly linguistic approach to their survey of the structure of the Slavonic languages, principally thosewith official status.They begin with an introduction detailing how they approached the study and examining the languages of the South, East and West Slavs, their variants and nomenclature, and their genetic clas sification and typology.There follow eleven chapters covering their linguistic evolution, genetic affiliation and classification, their socio-historical evolution, theirphonology, theirmorphophonology, their inflectionalmorphology, their syntactic categories and morphosyntax, their sentence structure, their word formation, their lexis, their dialects, and some socio-linguistic issues. Three appendices give abbreviations, orthography and transliteration, and resources for studying Slavonic linguistics.Although written by two leading scholars in the traditional format for linguistic studies (withnumbered examples and several levels of numbered headings), the work is accessible to the more general reader 'with some competence in descriptive linguistics' (p. 13) and is quite comprehensive despite some selectiveness. It will certainly be welcomed by scholars and students of theSlavonic languages and other linguisticians and linguistswho need an entrypoint into the Slavonic field. The first two chapters deal with the prehistory of Slavonic, its connection with Indo-European and Baltic, the phonology, morphology and syntax of Proto-Slavonic, the subdivision of Slavonic, which examines the main features of each of the three families of Slavonic languages, and the socio-historical evolution of the three families: South Slavonic (Old Church Slavonic and Church Slavonic, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian, Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian, and Slovenian), East Slavonic (Russian, Ukrainian and Belaru sian) and West Slavonic (Polish, Upper and Lower Sorbian, Kashubian and Slovincian, Polabian, Czech and Slovak). An overview is presented at the end of each chapter. The third chapter examines the development of the Proto-Slavonic vowel and consonant systems, sound combinations and suprasegmental features (stress, quantity, tone), together with the modern vowel and consonant sys tems (phonemes, phonetics) and suprasegmentals. Starting with an overview, the chapter on morphophonology deals with separate and combined vowel and consonant alternations and themorphological typology of alternations (noun, adjective and verb inflexions and word formation). There is a section on morphophonology and Slavonic orthographies. The chapter on 514 SEER, 86, 3, JULY 2008 morphology begins with an overview before coveringmorphological categories and structures,morphological word classes, inflectional categories (number, case, definiteness and deixis, gender, person, tense, aspect, voice and mood) and paradigms (nouns, the adjective and determiner declension, firstand second person pronouns and the reflexive pronoun, numerals and verbs, including athematic and auxiliary verbs). The sixth chapter covers syntactic units, syntactic roles and relations (concord, agreement, government and case) and the syntax and morphosyntax of aspect. The chapter on sentence structure begins with an overview and covers definiteness, questions, negation, imperatives, passives, conditionals, possession, coordinate and subordinate constructions, and specific construc tion types (pronouns and anaphora, reflexives, apersonal and impersonal constructions, indirect speech, participial and gerundial constructions, and ellipsis and deletion), together with word order and the Prague School's concept of functional sentence perspective. As various types of word formation (e.g. prefixation, suffixation, root combination, mixed types) are looked at in nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and other parts of speech, morphophonological features of word forma tion are also examined. The next chapter considers patterns of lexis, lexical composition and sources in the modern Slavonic languages, coexistent lexical strata (e.g. Church Slavonic and Russian inRussian, Russian and Turkish in Bulgarian), root exploitation (including lexical specialization and verbs of motion), lexical innovations, both indigenous (e.g. compounding, abbreviated words) and externally influenced (borrowing, caiques), and post-Communist lexis. The tenth chapter, after an overview, examines dialects of the main South, East and West Slavonic languages, while the final chapter...

The basic colour terms of Lower Sorbian and Upper Sorbian and their typological relevance

Berlin & Kay’s basic colour term framework claims that there is an ordering in the diachronic development of languages’ colour systems. One generalisation is that primary colours, WHITE, BLACK, RED, YELLOW, GREEN, BLUE, are lexical­ised before derived colours, which are perceptual blends, e.g. ORANGE is the blend of YELLOW and RED. The colour systems of Lower Sorbian and Upper Sorbian offer an important typological contribution. It is already known that primary colour space can contract upon the emergence of a basic derived term; our findings indicate that derived categories also shift as colour systems develop. Tsakhur offers corroborating evidence.

Geschichte der sorbischen Grammatikschreibung. Von den Anfängen bis zum Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts by Sonja Wölke (review)

REVIEWS !33 there is an incorrect alphabetical order in the references on p. 67. As stated by the editors, they 'kept different styles of transliteration of Cyrillic and adjusted them according to accepted standards' (p. 7). Yet for non-Cyrillic names, there is a disturbing inconsistency, as in the case of 'Al-Ghazzali' in Romanchuk's essay (pp. 148, 149, etc.) and the Index, and 'Al-Ghaz?lF in Taube's text (pp. 191, 194, etc.), although the Library of Congress lists this name as (al-)Ghazzal?. A more serious shortcoming ishidden in the titleof the book. The editors erroneously equate the Russian pozdnee srednevekov 'e, stretch ing, according to East Slavic historiography, from the late fifteenth to the seventeenth century,with theLate Middle Ages in West European tradition, covering a time span between roughly 1300 and 1500. Save for the latter drawback, most shortcomings are relatively inconse quential and will not diminish the book's appeal to a wide range of scholars interested in the cultural and linguistic history of thatperiod, who will surely find it most stimulating and enlightening. Pace University, New York Andrii Danylenko W?lke, Sonja. Geschichte der sorbischenGrammatikschreibung. Von den Anfangen bis zum Ende des ig. Jahrhunderts.Schriften des Sorbischen Instituts, 38. Domowina, Bautzen, 2005. 304 pp. Bibliographies. Index. 24.90 (paperback). In 1650, or perhaps a littleearlier,Johannes Choinanus (1610-64), a graduate of the University ofWittenberg and a native-speaker of Lower Sorbian, without any precedent to guide him, set about writing the firstSorbian gram mar. That is the beginning of the story thisbook has to tell.More precisely, however, the story of Sorbian grammar-writing has three beginnings, embod ied in the grammars of Choinanus (1650), Georgius Ludovici (before 1673), andjakub Xaver Ticin (1679), for these threeworks do not form a progression. On the contrary, each one of them represents the beginning of a separate tradition. Choinanus came from the north of Sorbian territory, Ludovici from the south. Ticin came from roughly halfway in between. Choinanus and Ludovici were both Protestants, but they spoke different dialects and the linguistic gap between them was considerable, so their grammars laid the grammatical foundations for the separate Upper and Lower Sorbian literary languages (or variants). Ticin was a Jesuit. All three were priests and itwas missionary goals that stimulated the need to understand Sorbian grammar. The Reformation had come early to the Sorbs. In 1520 inPostwitz (Budestecy) Paul Bossack had preached theGospel and permitted his flock to receive communion in both kinds, but even by the end of theThirty Years War (1648), by which time 90 per cent of Sorbs were Lutherans, they still had neither the Bible nor even printed extracts from the Bible in theirmother tongue. They made do with homespun oral or manuscript translations fromLuther's Bible, improvised by theirpastors, some of whom were aided by the grammars of Choinanus and Ludovici, which circulated in manuscript copies. These translations varied a good deal and caused confusion. 134 SEER, 86, I, 2008 Ticin had plans for the re-conversion of his compatriots to theChurch of Rome and knew that his dialect, which was closer than Ludovici's to the Sorbian ofLower Lusatia, was justwhat was needed for thismission. He saw that a separate grammar of his dialect was necessary and in 1679 in Prague he published his Principia linguae wendicae, the firstprinted Sorbian grammar, laying down a framework for Sorbian literature of theCounter-Reformation. The Upper Lusatian States, realizing now that their Sorbian subjects, having no Bible of their own, were vulnerable to the blandishments of Rome, responded by appointing Paul Pr?torius to head a committee to produce Upper Sorbian translations of themain devotional texts.The committee used Ludovici's manuscript grammar and, showing a degree of pragmatism, used Ticin as well. It is inevitable that Sonja W?lke's subject should involve questions of historical dialectology, for in the seventeenth century itwas said that there were asmany dialects as therewere parishes and, though the dialectal features and their boundaries changed, this was still true 300 years later. Expert handling of the local and chronological variation underlying attempts to describe Sorbian grammar isone of the outstanding ingredients in thisbook's success. However...

Mato Kosyk: Poet of the Lower Sorbs

SEER, Vol.85,NAo. 2, April2007 Review Article Mato Kosyk:Poet of the Lower Sorbs GERALD STONE Janas, Pets and Marti, Roland (eds). Mato Kogyk. Spise.Celkowny wudawk. 4 vols (vol. 3 in two parts). Ludowe nakladnistwo Domowina, Budysyn, 2000, 200I, 2003, 2004, 2006. 480, 400, 595, 480, 375 PP. Tables. Notes. Documents. Bibliography. Indexes. 12.90 per volume/part. THE language of the Lower Sorbs is critically endangered. In 1995there were reckoned to be fewer than 7,000 speakers, most of whom were over sixty years old.' Even a century earlier they had numbered no more than 76,ooo,2 but at that time they at least formed a compact, close-knit community with a vigorous linguistic culture. Outstanding among their poets is Mato Kosyk (I853-I940) and, whatever the prospects for the language, his achievement remains and will continue to interest readers with a fondness for the secluded areas of European literature. For them and for literary scholars, whose attention Kosyk also merits, the appearance of this finely-produced critical edition of the complete works, now more than halfway towards completion, is an event of some importance. It contains poems (including hymns), prose, and correspondence. The critical apparatus, like the works themselves, is in Lower Sorbian. Mato Kosyk was born on i8 June I853 in the village of Werben (So. Wjerbno), some fifty miles south-east of Berlin. He was sent to the village school and, at the age of eight, began to learn German.3 Werben lies on the edge of the Spree Forest (Ger. Spreewald/So. Blota), a wooded fenland, where the Spree, as it flows north-west, divides into a network of rivulets, which are later reunited before it reaches Berlin. This landscape and its specific ecology moulded Kosyk's consciousness and appear time and again in his poetry. He attended the Cottbus gymnasium from I867 to I873, after which he worked as an untenured GeraldStone is an EmeritusFellowat HertfordCollege,Oxford. ' Ralph Jodlbauer, Gunter SpieBi and Han Steenwijk, Die aktuelleSituationder niedersorbischen Sprache. Ergebnisse einersoziolinguistischen Untersuchung derJahre i993-1995, Bautzen,200I, p. 39. 2 Ernst Muka, 'Statistika Serbow sakskeho kralestwa', casopis Mac'icy Serbskee,i886, p. 57. 3Biographical detailshere and hereafterare from Frido Metsk,MatoKosyk, Bautzen, I985, and RichardDalitz and GeraldStone, 'Mato Kosykin America',IltopisInstituta za serbskiludospyt, series A, 24, I977, pp. 42-79. 326 MATO KOSYK: POET OF THE LOWER SORBS employee of the Leipzig-Dresden Railway Company. His first published work, the poem 'Psi p?eze' ('Spinning'),appeared in the weekly Bramborski serski casnik in I877. He resigned from the railwaythat year and returnedto Werben, where for six years he lived with his parents and pursued his literary craft with remarkableintensity. The greater part of his life'swork was produced during the period I877 to I883. Single poems printedin periodicalsmarkedthe firststepsin Kosyk's literarycareer;but in i88o he published as a separate title his Serbska swajzba w Blotach (A SorbianWedding in the Spree Forest),a narrative poem in almost 2000 hexameters,in which one of the most memorable features are the detailed descriptions of traditional Sorbian wedding customsand rituals.To this period belong also the two dramaticworks Bozemjeserbskich wojakow(The Sorbian Soldiers' Farewell) and Cesc 1uzyskego gys'aja (The Honour of a Lusatian Hero), as well as his epic trilogy from Sorbian history, Serbskich woscows'erpjenje a chwalba(The Suffering and Glory of our Sorbian Forefathers),comprising Pserada markgroby Gera(The Treachery of Margrave Gero), Branibora pad (The Fall of Brandenburg),andJacslow.In addition, during the six years at home in Werben, he wrote over 200 shorterpoems, exhibitinga broa(d thematic range and a great variety of forms and, at the same time, assumedthe main burdenin the revisionof the Lower Sorbianhymnal. This was not mere editorial work. Although the hymns had all been translatedpreviously, many of Kosyk's versions are entirely new. He also workedwith HajndrichJordanand Kito Swjelaediting the weekly Lower Sorbian newspaper under its new title (fromJanuary i88I), Bramborske nowiny. Kosyk's ambition was to be a clergyman in a Sorbian parish, but having left school without the Abitur,he could not enter a German university.However, having for some years dreamedof travellingoverseas and hearingthat in America the lack of the Abitur was...

Lower Sorbian — twice a minority language

The Lower Sorbian language is in a double minority situation. Together with Upper Sorbian, it is a minority language in the context of Germany, where the majority language is German. Within the Sorbian context, it is a minority language in its relationship with Upper Sorbian. The article describes the development of Lower Sorbian in this double minority context up to the present. Special attention is paid to the intra-Sorbian minority situation, since this aspect of the Lower Sorbian language question has not yet been studied adequately due to ideological constraints.

On the relationship between small and large Slavic languages

This article draws on the analysis of (standard) Slavic languages comprising the following pairs: Slovenian – Serbo-Croatian, Lower Sorbian – Upper Sorbian, Slovak – Czech, Rusyn – Slovak, Belarusian – Russian, and Ukrainian – Russian. In these pairs, the first language may be classified as small, the second one as large. This may be done on the basis of the following criteria: number of speakers, spread of the language, its economic strength, status of speakers, how the language is elaborated, and its prestige. These factors operate in particular periods of history, thus a language may vary regarding its “smallness” or “largeness.” The notion of a small or large language is relative: with respect to a particular language, a language may be small and with respect to a different language, the same language may be large. Given that the areas where these languages are spoken border on each other and “semicommunication” (Haugen 1966) between their speakers is possible, the large languages influence the small ones. A large language penetrates the communicative domains of a small language or even its structure, especially in terms of vocabulary. The legal equality of small and large languages cannot stop these processes, as it works to the benefit of large languages simply due to their “largeness.” Actual equality may be guaranteed by compensatory measures to the detriment of large languages.

Ten Poems of Mato Kosyk (1853–1940) Translated and Introduced

Mato Kosyk, the foremost Lower Sorbian (Lower Wendish) poet, was born in 1853 in Werben, fifty miles south-east of Berlin. Despite the limits of his literary inheritance (mainly devotional texts and folklore) he began in his mid twenties to produce secular lyric poetry in profusion. At the age of thirty he emigrated to the USA, where he became a Lutheran pastor, but his poetic activity was interrupted only by his death in 1940. The ten poems of which translations are appended to the article span a period of over fifty years and reflect various chapters in the poet's life story. An unusual feature is the juxtaposition of Sorbian and American themes.

Serbska bibliografija 1996-2000 by Franc Šěn (review)

REVIEWS 7 I I that ProfessorBailey's own researches, particularlyas set forth in his Three Russian Lyric FolkSong Meters(Columbus, OH, 1993), have been concentrated on the folklyricmetres. The kernelof thisbook and the fullestdemonstrationof itsauthor'sresearch method is found in the sixth article (pp. I88-224), which summarizes his monograph of 1993. In it he setsout the groundsfor his view that even in folk lyric verse, more heterogeneous and disorderly than folk narrative verse, metrical feet can be recognized, and that each folk lyric song has a basic metre, deviations from which are not fortuitous irregularities but the consequence of the substitutionof its basic metre by other metreswhich have evolved from it. Three basic metres are postulated: a nine-syllable trochaic tetrameterwith dactylicending;the Russianvariantof the Slavonic 5 + 5 folk lyric metre; and a two-stresstonic line with a disyllabicanacrusis,a dactylic ending and an interval between ictuses of from two to six syllables:with a disyllabic interval between the ictuses this last line is the familiar anapaestic dimeterwith dactylicending. James Bailey is described by Professor Gasparov as the pupil of Roman Jakobson and KirillTaranovskii,and rightly.FromJakobson he takeshislong historical perspective and his readiness to speculate and theorize. To Taranovskii, on the other hand, he owes the method of statistical analysis which Taranovskiiappliedsuccessfullyto the studyof Russianliterarymetres. Bailey's conspicuous merit, to which Professor M. A. Engovatova draws attention in the book's second preface (p. I6), is his reliance on the inductive method of argumentwhich setshim apartfrommany investigatorsof Russian verse and gives his work the credibility and validity which their works sometimeslack. Of course, much remainsto be done, but futureresearchersinto the metres of Russian folksongs can build on the foundationswhich ProfessorBaileyhas laid with confidence. Imperial College London C. L. DRAGE Sen, Franc(ed.). Serbska bibliografija I996-2000. Spisy Serbskehoinstituta,36. Domowina Verlag, Bautzen, 2003. 460 pp. Indexes. ?24.90. BIBLIOGRAPHIESare of courseprimarilyworksof reference.They facilitatethe retrievalof informationfrom the sourcesthey catalogue. But they also help us quantify publishing activity and thus to assess cultural vitality in particular areas.This Sorbianbibliography,for example, the latestin a seriespublished at five-yearlyintervalsby the SorbianInstitutein Bautzen and editedby Franc Sen assistedby a team of experts,is a measureof the vigourof Sorbianculture at the end of the twentiethcentury.It suppliesdetailsof books,articles,reviews and CDs published in Upper and Lower Sorbian on all subjects, as well as those of items in other languages dealing with any aspect of Sorbianlife. The totalnumberof entriesrecordedfortheperiod I996 to 2000 is 7,607, of which the majority(perhapsas many as two thirds)are in one of the two variantsof the Sorbianlanguage. The contents are classifiedunderfourteenheadings:(i) general Sorbian studies, (ii) mass-communication media, (iii) archives, 7I2 SEER, 82, 3, 2004 libraries, museums, and publishing, (iv) the Lusatian landscape, (v) history, (vi)the Domowina, (vii)language, (viii)literature,(ix)ethnography,(x)music, (xi) the theatre, (xii) graphic arts, (xiii) education and (xiv)religion. To some of the lessstraightforwardtitlesa briefannotationis added. Retrievalisfurther facilitated by indexes of authors' names, other personal names, and placenames . The Sorbianlanguage, despiteconstantpressurefromits German-language environment, seems to be still showing fight. Indeed, if publishing is an indicatorofvitality,Sorbianmaybe said,in thisrespectatleast,to be thriving. Publishing,however, is not the only criterionof a language'sprogressand the future of Sorbian is stilluncertain. A key factor in a language's survivalis the range of domains in which it operates and we can learn at least something of this from the Sorbian titles provided here. For example, in view of the susceptibilityof nearlyall languages, not only those endangered,to the loss of domains, and given thatfew domains areasvulnerableasthe naturalsciences, it is significant that Sorbian is the language of several new biology and mathematicstextbooks(pp. 403-04). At the same time, the question naturally arises whether Sorbian is used for any other publications on these subjects. Fromthe fiveyearsunder reviewthereis no evidence that it is. Folklorization,the process whereby an endangered language is gradually squeezed out of high-statusdomains, is proceeding very slowlyin the Sorbian speech-community, but it is encountering resistance, as demonstrated, for example, by the use of Sorbian in the press, films, radio, and television (Section Two) and in discourseson such subjectsas geography (Sections Six and Thirteen), linguistics (Section Seven), literature...

Upper Sorbian (review)

Reviewed by: Upper Sorbian by Gunter Schaar-schmidt Gary H. Toops Upper Sorbian. By Gunter Schaar-schmidt. (Languages of the world/Materials 160.) Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2002. Pp. 80. ISBN 3895862606. $34.50. Upper Sorbian is the fourth largest of the West Slavic literary languages (after Polish, Czech, and Slovak) and is spoken within the eastern German region of Upper Lusatia, in the state of Saxony (Freistaat Sachsen). In this more or less comprehensive sketch of the grammar of Upper Sorbian, Schaar-schmidt maintains that ‘the number of Upper Sorbian speakers does not exceed 53,600’, but his use of the term ‘Upper Sorbian speakers’ apparently encompasses [End Page 186] actual speakers of the various Upper Sorbian dialects as well as users of the Upper Sorbian literary language. Upper Sorbian adheres to the same template as all the other booklet-length grammatical sketches in LINCOM’s ‘Languages of the world/Materials’ series: ‘Socio- and geolinguistic data’ (Part 0), ‘Phonology’ (Part 1), ‘Morphology’ (Part 2), ‘Syntax’ (Part 3), and ‘Texts’ (Part 4). The texts are provided with both word-for-word and comprehensive English translations, and all language samples are followed by English glosses. Part 4 also includes an ‘explanatory glossary’ followed by a list of symbols and abbreviations, a list of literary sources, a bibliography, and a map of ‘the Sorbian language area’. Considering the space limitations imposed by the publisher, S manages to provide a fairly accurate description of the language. However, by failing to distinguish between statal and actional passives—only the latter capable of cooccurring with an agentive ‘by’ (Upper Sorbian wot or přez) phrase—S misconstrues the Upper Sorbian passive voice (43–44, 61–62). His statement that ‘auxiliary deletion is . . . possible in embedded sentences not involving the subjunctive’ (65) is incorrect; the auxiliary deletion to which S refers is actually limited to concessive clauses introduced by the subordinating conjunction byrnjež or runjež ‘although, even if’ (and does ‘involve’ the subjunctive). And S’s rules of clitic placement (58–60) are frequently contradicted by the language samples he cites elsewhere in the booklet (e.g. 54). Worrisome, too, is S’s facile assertion that ‘[t]here was at one time quite a debate as to whether Upper Sorbian and Lower Sorbian should be considered dialectal variants or separate languages. That debate seems to have settled, with the term “Sorbian” used somewhat like the term “English” ’ (6). This will come as a surprise to those familiar with relatively recent Sorabistic publications like Hinc Šewc’s article ‘Łužiska serbšćina—jedna abo dwě rěči? (Problematika a staw diskusije)’ [‘Lusatian Sorbian—one or two languages? (Scope of the problem and status of the discussion)’] (Lětopis 44.149–59, 1997. Reprinted in Das Sorbische im slawischen Kontext: Ausgewählte Studien, by Heinz Schuster-Šewc, 66–78, Bautzen: Domowina, 2000). In fact, the debate has not ‘settled’ at all nor is it accurate to maintain that the term ‘Sorbian’ is used (by most Sorbs and Sorabists) ‘like the term “English” ’. Echoing an isolated statement published by a member of the Sorbian Institute (Eduard Werner, Studien zum sorbischen Verbum, Bautzen: Domowina, 1996, p. 13), S further claims that ‘[e]specially in the case of younger-generation speakers . . . aspect plays only a subordinate role’ (35). Not only does S thereby fail to specify to what he considers aspect to be ‘subordinate’ (tense? aspectuality? derivation?), but he also ignores the published assessment of another, prominent Sorabist that ‘by and large, the aspectual system of both Upper and Lower Sorbian (even of colloquial and dialectal varieties, where German influence is strongest) is intact’ (Gerald Stone, ‘Sorbian [Upper and Lower]’, The Slavonic languages, ed. by Bernard Comrie and Greville G. Corbett, London: Routledge, 1993 [2001], p. 636). An 80-page compendium of Upper Sorbian grammar is a worthwhile undertaking and has its scholarly merits. The shortcomings delineated above could easily be remedied within the editorial parameters of the LINCOM series; therefore, a revised, corrected edition of S’s Upper Sorbian would be as feasible as it would be welcome. Gary H. Toops Wichita State University Copyright © 2004 Linguistic Society of America

Der Einfluss obersorbischer Lexik auf die niedersorbische Schriftsprache. Ein Beitrag zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der niedersorbischen Schriftsprache by Anja Pohontsch (review)

526 SEER, 8i, 3, 2003 the stressedpluralsuffix-a referredto on p. 345 as a southerndialectalfeature (presumablynon-standard)while threelinesfurtheron thepluralforminzenera is labelled 'substandard'?'Substandard'is not used in WesternEuropean and North American sociolinguistics. There is no referenceto the huge amount of analysisof spontaneousspoken Russianby Zemskaja,Lapteva,Shmelev, Kitajgorodskajaand many others. The treatment of syntax is brief and uneven. For example, discussing examples 'Mne nuzna eta kniga', Cubberley states (p. 2I6) that 'In some impersonal constructions the logical object may appear in the Nominative, though one may argue that the Nominative is as much logical subject as object'. Nuizna is neither transitivenor a verb, the clause is active and knigais nominative. How could it be a logical object (Patient)?'Logical object' is undefined (pp. 215-I6), and the definition of 'logical subject' (p. i85) collapsesAgent with theme/topic. Middle voice (p. I96) is saidto be essentiallya morphologicalissue,but it is equally a valency issue and a discourse issue to do with how middle voice functionsin texts. What does it mean to saythatreflexiveverbsareone way of expressing the Passive (p. I97)? Cubberley neither explains nor defines 'PassiveVoice'. Crisp discussion of the genitive-accusativewith negated verbs requiresthe concept of reference to specific and non-specific entities and the distinction between singular and plural nouns and concrete and abstract nouns. Cubberley'saccount has none of these. Non-Russianists will profit more from relevant books in the LINCOM EUROPA series. Rich data and clear 'non-technical' syntactic analysis are offered in T. Wade's A Comprehensive RussianGrammar (Oxford, 200 I) or D. Offord's UsingRussian. A Guide toContemporagy Usage (Cambridge, I996). For information about on-going changes in Russian studentswill consult Ryazanova -Clarkeand Wade's TheRussian Language Today (London, I999). Three books in Englishhave yet to be written:a historicaland variationist account of standardspoken and written Russian and the many non-standard varieties; an introduction to style and the analysis of Russian discourse; a sociolinguisticaccount of the emergence and elaborationof standardRussian. Where Cubberleyhas gone astrayis in tryingto hit all these targetsand reach two differentaudiences. Theoretical andApplied Linguistics JIMMILLER School ofPhilosophy, Psychology andLanguage Studies University ofEdinburgh Pohontsch,Anja.DerEinfluss obersorbischer Lexik aufdieniedersorbische Schrftsprache. Ein Beitrag zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der niedersorbischen Schriftsprache. Schriftendes SorbischenInstituts/Spisy Serbskehoinstituta, 30. Domowina Verlag, Bautzen, 2002. 368 pp. Tables. Notes. Appendices. Bibliography .?22.90 (paperback). THOUGH the questionwhetherSorbianisone languageor twoisunanswerable, there is no doubt about the existence of the two standardlanguages.Until the REVIEWS 527 I840s they were both used to produce predominantly devotional literature. The national movement among the Upper Sorbs stimulatedthe appearance of varioussecularpublications, including a weekly newspaper,but among the Lower Sorbsit was on the initiativenot of national activistsbut of the Prussian authorities that a weekly newspaper was founded in i848. The Bramborski serbski Casnik, as it was called, circulated in a few hundred copies among the 72,000 Sorbs estimated to have been living in Lower Lusatia at that time. Since then it has changed its name several times and suffered a few interruptions,but it has managed to surviveto the present day (since I949 as NowyCasnik). Longevity alone makes it a uniquely valuable linguistic source and Dr Anja Pohontsch has chosen wisely in taking it as the basis for this excellent study of Upper Sorbian lexical influence on the Lower Sorbian standard language. A vocabulary analysing 858 Upper Sorbian borrowings used in the Lower Sorbian weekly between i 848 and I995 formsthe nucleus of the book. The preliminarychaptersinclude a helpfulsurveyof the historical background and the vocabulary is followed by a chronological account relatinglexical to historicalevents and by an examination of the treatmentof the borrowings of lexicographers. This is a thoughtful contribution to the history of the Lower Sorbian standard language, providing significant new insightsinto the mind of its users. Identifying words borrowed by one Slavonic language from another is particularlydifficultwhen the languages in question are as closely related as Upper and Lower Sorbian. Formalcriteriaalone are often inadequate. One might, for example, regardthe presence in a given word of Proto-Slavonic *g (absence of the Upper Sorbian sound change g> h)as evidence that it is not a borrowing;but it has been observed, not only in the Sorbian situation (e.g. Uriel Weinreich, Languages in Contact. Findings andProblems, 2nd...

Traduzione e rielaborazione nelle letterature di Polonia Ucraina e Russia, XVI-XVIII secolo by Marcello Piacentini (review)

528 SEER, 8i, 3, 2003 Sorbian or Czech to supply their lexical needs. But, as Dr Pohontsch's statisticalanalysis shows, contributorsto the Lower Sorbian weekly were at first fairly impassive. Though they did borrow a little from Upper Sorbian, theywere only slightlyinhibitedin theiruse of Germanisms.Of the 858 Upper Sorbianborrowingsin thevocabulary,only 55 were introducedin I848- I9I5. After the FirstWorldWar there was a great surge:the number for the period I9I6-33 was 269. In 1947 Lower Sorbian was introduced to the school system,but many of the teachersin LowerSorbianschoolswere Upper Sorbs. Upper Sorbsalsocontributedto LowerSorbianpublications.Not surprisingly, this led to the greatest increase of all in the influence of Upper Sorbian: between I947 and 1959, 367 new borrowings appeared. Significantly,since the mid i970S therehas been a markeddecreasein both the adoption and use of Upper Sorbian borrowings, while Germanisms have been staging a comeback. HerfordCollege, Oxford GERALD STONE Piacentini, Marcello (ed.). Traduzionee rielaborazionenelle letterature di Polonia Ucraina e Russia, XVI-XJXIII secolo. Slavica. Collana di studi slavi, 3. Edizioni dell'Orso, Alessandria, 1999. 474 pp. Tables. Notes. Index. L7o,ooo. THIS collection of twenty-three papers, delivered at an international conference at Gargnano on Lake Garda, northern Italy in September i 996, illustrates how little the problems confronting translators and the solutions they have devised for them have changed over the centuries. Despite the internet, databases and modern translation theory, present-day translators resort to much the same techniques as their predecessors of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. As the collection's title indicates, 'target' languages include Church Slavonic, Russian, Ukrainian and Polish. Among the 'source' languages are Italian, Latin, French, English and the Greek of the Septuagint and the New Testament. Most of the contributions deal with translations of specific works; a few are more general; two explore aspects of translation theory. According to A. Borowski in the first of these papers (pp. 23-38), the Polish translators of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries postulated three ways of translating. One is word for word, literal translation, which is recommended for translating 'spiritual books'. A second is to deploy to the full the translator's ownI concepts and inventiveness with the aim of producing something like a free adaptation. A third way arose in response to the enthusiastic interest which the sixteenth-century Polish translators from the Italian took in politics. They were well aware of the gulf which separated the Italian culture of the Cinquecento from the mentality of the contemporary Polish reader. So, for such a translator, 'translation did not mean [ ...] any literal transmission of images, ideas or patterns of culture ... .1 the perfect translator should not follow mechanically the original. His task was to remodel it according to native needs and in regard to customs' (pp. 36-37). This is a striking anticipation of modern localization theory. REVIEWS 529 In the second of these papers S. I. Nikolaev (pp. 2 I 5-25) points out that in Russia at the end of the seventeenth centurya theory of translationwas being devised for use with theological works:a theory for the translationof artistic compositionshad to wait untila concept of artisticliteraturehad been evolved (p. 2 I6). The translatorsof the Posol'skiziprikaz leftno recordof theirtheoretical views, but their practice shows that they had no scruplesabout treatingtheir originalsfreely.Nikolaev concludesthatroundthe turnof the centurya Polish poem to be translatedinto Russian had firstto be adapted to an appropriate Russianliterarygenre and that the form, styleand language of the translation would be determined by the characteristics of that genre. In this period, therefore,deviationsfrom the originalsshould not be regardedas distortions; they merely reflect the translation techniques of the time (pp. 222-23). H. Rothe (pp. 109-26) deals with the transmission from one culture to another of a particular literary genre, the spiritual song (dukhovnaia pesnia). He relates how the genre came into being at the end of the Middle Ages and how during the Reformation it spread from Germany and the Czech lands into Poland, where a powerful Protestant movement was stirring among the nobility and the urban populations. Established in Poland, it passed over into Belorussia and the Ukraine, and in i 649 it accompanied the first learned monks to be summoned from Kiev...

Phonetic and phonological aspects of Slavic sibilant fricatives

In this artiele I reanalyze sibilant inventories of Slavic languages by taking into consideration acoustic. perceptive and phonological evidence. The main goal of this study is to show that perception is an important factor which determines the shape of sibilant inventories. The improvement of perceptual contrast essentially contributes to creating new sibilant inventories by (i) changing the place of articulation of the existing phonemes (ii) merging sibilants that are perceptually very close or (iii) deleting them.
 
 It has also been shown that the symbol s traditionally used in Slavic linguistics corresponds to two sounds in the IP A system: it stands for a postalveolar sibilant (ʃ) in some Slavic languages, as e.g. Bulagarian, Czech, Slovak, some Serbian and Croatian dialects, whereas in others like Polish, Russian, Lower Sorbian it functions as a retroflex (ʂ). This discrepancy is motivated by the fact that ʃ is not optimal in terms of maintaining sufficient perceptual contrast to other sibilants such as s and ɕ. If ʃ occurs together with s (and sʲ) there is a considerable perceptual distance between them but if it occurs with ɕ in an inventory, the distance is much smaller. Therefore, the strategy most languages follow is the change from a postalveolar to a retroflex sibilant.

Approaching the Rise of Spoken Standard Language: The Case of Polish, Czech, and Slovak, 1800-1918

THE SLAVONIC AND EAST EUROPEAN REVIEW Volume 8o, Number 4-October 2002 Approaching the Rise of Spoken Standard Language: The Case of Polish, Czech, and Slovak, 800- I9I8 KAREN GAMMELGAARD Introduction A FUNDAMENTAL difference exists between linguistic communities wherethe standardlanguageexistsonly in itswrittenvariety,and those where the written standardhas been adapted to serve as a norm for speaking.The emergence of thisspokenvarietyis a turningpoint in the history of linguistic stratification: the dichotomy situation (written standard versus dialects) moves to a trichotomy situation (written standard spoken standard dialects). Several variables cause the adaptation. In the process of analysis, the paramount difficultylies in identifyingthe factorsand determiningtheirrelativesignificance. This paper proposes an approach to the rise of the spoken standard where focus on five extra-linguisticfactors is advocated. By applying the approach to Polish, Czech, and Slovak, we may evaluate the adequacyof the approach.Using theproposedmethod on severalcases is required:attention to a single language may result in exaggerating the importanceof singlevariables. Firstof all, it shouldbe stressedthat the very term 'spokenstandard' is problematic. It is used here only of the spoken reflection of an establishedwrittenstandard,not of the formalregisterof speech that is Karen Gammelgaard is associate professor of Czech language and literature at the Department of East European and Oriental Studies at the University of Oslo. 602 THE RISE OF SPOKEN STANDARD LANGUAGE most often the basis of the written standard. The term will be readdressedin section eight.' Polish,Czech, and Slovakare geneticallyand typologicallyadjacent. Includedin theWesternsubgroupof the Slavoniclanguages,proximity has been defined on the basis of old phonological developments. Morphology, lexicon and syntax, however, show considerable differences , especiallybetween Polishon the one hand and Czech and Slovak on the other.2The decisivereasonwhy thesethreelanguageshave been selected for discussion here is their modern polyfunctionality: only these West Slavonic languages are today used in all standardlanguage functions, including those linked with statehood which Polish, Czech, and to a somewhatlimited extent, Slovakgained in I9I 8.3 In the century leading up to I9I8, the Poles, the Czechs, and the Slovakswere subjectsof largemulti-ethnicempires.The term 'national revival'coversthe diverseprocessesin the nineteenth centurywhen the Slavonic nations struggledto restoretheirculturaland politicalvigour. 1 Since they lack common definitory criteria, Polish, Czech, and Slovak terms more or less covering the phenomenon of the spoken standard will not be used here. Some equivalences between Slavonic and English terms used in the study of standard language are listed in A. Jedlicka (ed.), Slovnikslovanske lingvistickiterminologie, 2 vols, Hamburg, 1977, I,pp. 22-27. 2 For a traditional survey of phonological differences between the three main groups of Slavonic languages, see e.g. Karel Horalek, Uvoddostudiaslovanskjch jazyku, Prague, I 955, pp. 56-59. Modern scholars tend to use a less rigid classification of the Slavonic languages, see, for example, Arnost Lamprecht, Praslovanstina,Brno, I987. Recent surveys of contrastive studies of Polish, Czech, and Slovak are Eduard Lotko, 'Cestina a polstina', in J. Korensky (ed.), NJajnowsze dziejejCzyk6w stowianiskich, Ceskjj'azyk,Opole, I998, pp. 33-43 (Polish versus Czech), and J. Korensky, 'Cestina a slovenstina', in ibid., pp. 20-33 (Czech versus Slovak). Contrastive studies of Polish and Slovak appeared in the series Studia Linguistica Polono-Slovaca, 4 vols, I988- I994. Standard Polish and standard Slovak morphology have recently been compared by Ferdinand Buffa, 'K pol'sko-slovenskym jazykovym vztahom (na tvaroslovnom a slovotvornom materiAli)', Slavica slovaca, 33, I 998, 2, pp. I09-I6. A survey of morphological systems of the Slavonic standard languages is provided in Helena BelicovA, Ncstinporovndvaci morfologie spisovnjchjazyku slovanskjch, Prague, I998. 3 No attention will be paid here to West Slavonic languages that have never reached polyfunctionality. In the period under scrutiny, several attempts were made to transform West Slavonic languages into fully-fledged standard languages. This concerns Kashubian, see, for example, Zuzana Topolifiska, 'Kashubian', in A. M. Schenker and E. Stankiewicz (eds), The SlavicLiteraryLanguages,New Haven, CT, I980, pp. I83-94, and Upper and Lower Sorbian, see, for example, Helmut Faske, 'Der Weg des Sorbischen zur Schriftsprache ', in I. Fodor and C. Hagege (eds), LanguageReform.History and Future,6 vols, Hamburg, I983- I994, 6, pp. 257-83. Written East Slovak continued to be used in a set of standard language functions: see, for example, Ernst Eichler, Geschichte der Slowakischen Sprache,Leipzig, I982, pp. 68-69. Additionally...