South Slavic Languages Research Articles

Lexical Elements of Slavic Origin in Judezmo on South Slavic Territory, 16–19th Centuries: Uriel Weinreich and the History of Contact Linguistics

AbstractFrom the 19th–20th-century beginnings of modern linguistics, scholars reported on various results of interactions between diverse language speakers; but it was only with Uriel Weinreich’sLanguages in Contact(1953) that a solid theoretical basis for the systematic study of contact linguistics was elaborated. The present article studies lexical influences from South Slavic on Judezmo (Ladino/Judeo-Spanish) resulting from contact during the 16th–19th centuries between speakers of these two languages in the regions that, between 1918 and 1992, were known jointly as Yugoslavia. During the Ottoman and then Austro-Hungarian periods, borrowings in local Judezmo from South Slavic were relatively few compared with Turkisms. But from the nineteenth century, when the South Slavs gained political independence, Serbo-Croatian exerted an ever-increasing influence on Judezmo in this region. The case of Judezmo there differs considerably from Yiddish in Slavic Eastern Europe throughout the same period, as described by Uriel Weinreich and others.

The Position of Kajkavian in the South Slavic Dialect Continuum in Light of Old Accentual Isoglosses

Summary All South Slavic languages, from Bulgaria in the South-East to Slovenia in the North-West, are part of a dialect continuum. This paper outlines the position of what is traditionally called Kajkavian in that continuum in light of old accentual isoglosses. Kajkavian shares several old prosodic-phonological isoglosses with Slovene (such as the rise of the neocircumflex), while on the other hand it is connected with Western Štokavian and Čakavian through some morphological-categorial accentual isoglosses (like the innovative accent of the infinitive and l-participle).

Modeling the impact of orthographic coding on Czech–Polish and Bulgarian–Russian reading intercomprehension

Focusing on orthography as a primary linguistic interface in every reading activity, the central research question we address here is how orthographic intelligibility can be measured and predicted between closely related languages. This paper presents methods and findings of modeling orthographic intelligibility in a reading intercomprehension scenario from the information-theoretic perspective. The focus of the study is on two Slavic language pairs: Czech–Polish (West Slavic, using the Latin script) and Bulgarian–Russian (South Slavic and East Slavic, respectively, using the Cyrillic script). In this article, we present computational methods for measuring orthographic distance and orthographic asymmetry by means of the Levenshtein algorithm, conditional entropy and adaptation surprisal method that are expected to predict the influence of orthography on mutual intelligibility in reading.

Triumphs and challenges of two recent South Slavic Beowulfs

This essay discusses two twenty-first-century poetic translations of Beowulf into South Slavic languages: Croatian by Mate Maras (2001) and Macedonian by Dragi Mihajlovski (2013). Neither Maras nor Mihajlovski evoke the recent Balkan wars and their aftermath, nor do they consistently invoke the local epic traditions often considered analogous to Beowulf. Both translators practice a kind of defamiliarization, but in different ways. Maras occasionally deploys archaisms reminiscent of older Croatian literature, early Germanic borrowings into Slavic, and even Indo-European cognates, suggesting the temporal layering of the Anglo-Saxon poem. Mihajlovski, in contrast, creates a thoroughly baroque Beowulf, mixing disparate stylistic registers, bringing together distant geographies, and featuring more compounds than his source text. The essay concludes by asserting the value of those engagements with Beowulf that show us what the original does and those that show us the opposite, what it does not do.

О типологических особенностях текста Евангелия Тип-7 из собрания РГАДА ф. 381, № 7

The article is devoted to the 13th century Gospel Book, which is kept in the Russian State Archive of Old Records and registered under reference F. 381, № 7. The aim of the paper is to define the similarity of the manuscript to other old texts according to its content and order of readings. Moreover, the author attempts to find the Gospel Book’s place in the classification of full lectionaries. In the course of the analysis it is stated that the text has various typological features. Despite the fact that in some elements it resembles the South Slavonic Miroslav Gospel, it belongs to the most common type of full lectionaries in Ruthenia among which the leading role is played by Mstislav Gospel. Furthermore, the manuscript reflects the peculiar features of Milata Gospel, which makes it a part of the class of manuscripts represented by this old text of Novgorod.

The Uniparental Genetic Landscape of Modern Slavic Speaking Populations

Slavic speaking populations are the most numerous Indo-European ethnolinguistic group in Europe. They show great variety and fall into three groups: West, East and South Slavic populations. In order to contribute to the understanding of the correlation between linguistic and genetic affiliation of Slavic populations, we have analyzed for the first time their matrilineal and patrilineal relationships and we have also illustrated their position in the European uniparental genetic landscape. For the purpose, we have collected previously published data for the frequencies of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and Y-chromosome haplogroups in Slavic and other European populations and compared them by Principal Component Analysis (PCA). In the inter-Slavic population comparisons, West and East Slavs are in a closer position, whereas South Slavic populations are rather grouped on their own. In the European context, South Slavic populations are positioned more close to neighboring Balkan non-Slavic and North Italian populations, than to other Slavic populations. When considering the uniparental diversity of Slavic speaking populations, one should also take into account the prevalence of Y-chromosome haplogroup N among East Slavs (comprising almost half of the paternal gene pool in instances), which is almost absent among the other groups (not exceeding 2% - 3%). In conclusion, the data in the present study point that West-East and South Slavic speaking populations, behave as separate groups based on their uniparental genetic structure, which shows that they do not share substantial common genetic ancestry and that there is great genetic variety in the Slavic linguistic unity.

A comparison of Croatian and Slovenian exonyms

Croatian and Slovenian are very closely related South Slavic languages, but during their historical development they came under the influence of various other languages and various language policies determined by the broader framework of Hungary and Austria. This fact makes the comparative study of exonymization in both languages very interesting. Croatian and Slovenian exonyms are not only part of the cultural heritage of both nations, but also part of global cultural heritage. The article presents a comparative analysis of exonyms in both languages carried out as part of a bilateral project lasting a year and a half. The analysis is based on an improved typology, which was adjusted to the manner of exonymization for borrowed foreign geographical names in both of these related languages.

Linguistic Equivalence of the Hebrew Term Eden in Slavic Translations of the Bible

The authors study different equivalents of the Hebrew word Eden in selected old and new Slavic translations of the Bible. The equivalents of this lexeme have been excerpted from several Slavic translations of the Bible, which were selected on the basis of diverse criteria. The translations are presented chronologically and old translations are opposed to the new ones. They represent three groups of Slavic languages: West Slavic, East Slavic and South Slavic and are connected with the base of translation, i.e. the original text and/or Greek or Latin text. They can also be classified according to religious denomination and the strategy of the translation.The observation of those equivalents enables us to see not only their variety and mutual influence among translations but also the struggle of Slavic translators with a very difficult language matter. Many factors were important in that struggle: genetic and structural distances between Semitic and Slavic languages, different perceptions of reality in distant cultures, the discrepancy between biblical and Slavonic realities and the influence of religious denomination. Another important factor was the state of biblical knowledge at the time – incomparably poorer in the case of the oldest Slavic translations in comparison to modern ones.

Откровение св. Иоанна Богослова среди православных славян и в южнославянской письменности

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Binding in English and South Slavic and The Parameterized DP Hypothesis

Despić (2013) argues that Serbian binding data provide support for the Parameterized DP Hypothesis (e.g., Fukui 1988 , Corver 1992 , Zlatić 1997 , Bošković 2003 , 2005 , 2008 ). His key claim is that the differences in binding possibilities observed between English and Serbian result from the presence of a DP layer in the former vs. its absence in the latter. 1 Apparent determiners in Serbian are claimed to be NP-adjoined elements (with category left unspecified). 2 In this squib, I show that Despić's analysis makes incorrect predictions about Serbian and closely related Slavic languages: Bulgarian and Macedonian.

Traditional food uses of wild plants among the Gorani of South Kosovo

A food ethnobotanical field study was conducted among the Gorani of South Kosovo, a small ethnic minority group that speaks a South-Slavic language and lives in the south of the country. We conducted forty-one semi-structured interviews in ten villages of the Kosovar Gora mountainous area and found that seventy-nine wild botanical and mycological taxa represent the complex mosaic of the food cultural heritage in this population. A large portion of the wild food plant reports refer to fermented wild fruit-based beverages and herbal teas, while the role of wild vegetables is restricted. A comparison of these data with those previously collected among the Gorani living in nearby villages within the territory of Albania, who were separated in 1925 from their relatives living in present-day Kosovo, shows that approximately one third of the wild food plant reports are the same. This finding demonstrates the complex nature of Kosovar Gorani ethnobotany, which could indicate the permanence of possible “original” Gorani wild plant uses (mainly including wild fruits-based beverages), as well as elements of cultural adaptation to Serbian and Bosniak ethnobotanies (mainly including a few herbal teas and mushrooms).

Conjunct Agreement and Gender in South Slavic: From Theory to Experiments to Theory

Agreement with coordinated subjects in Slavic languages has recently seen a rapid increase in theoretical and experimental approaches, contributing to a wider theoretical discussion on the locus of agreement in grammar (cf. Marušič, Nevins, and Saksida 2007; Bošković 2009; Marušič, Nevins, and Badecker 2015). This paper revisits the theoretical predictions proposed for conjunction agreement in a group of South Slavic languages, with a special focus on gender agreement. The paper is based on two experiments involving speakers of Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) and Slovenian (Sln). Experiment 1 is an elicited production experiment investigating preverbal-conjunct agreement, while Experiment 2 investigates postverbal-conjunct agreement. The data provide experimental evidence discriminating between syntax proper and distributed-agreement models in terms of their ability to account for preverbal highest-conjunct agreement and present a theoretical mechanism for the distinction between default agreement (which has a fixed number and gender, independent of the value of each conjunct) and resolved agreement (which computes number and gender based on the values of each conjunct and must resolve potential conflicts). Focusing on the variability in the gender-agreement ratio across nine combinations, the experimental results for BCS and Sln morphosyntax challenge the notion of gender markedness that is generally posited for South Slavic languages.

The Genealogy of the 20th Century South Slavonic Novel: Zofka Kveder and Julka Chlapec-Djordjević

The Genealogy of the 20th Century South Slavonic Novel: Zofka Kveder and Julka Chlapec-Djordjević

Multilingualism and Dictionaries

Multilingualism and DictionariesThe Russian-Bulgarian-Polish dictionary that we (Wojciech Sosnowski, Violetta Koseska-Toszewa and Anna Kisiel) are currently developing has no precedent as far as its theoretical foundations and its structure are concerned. The dictionary offers a unique combination of three Slavic languages that belong to three different groups: a West Slavic language (Polish), a South Slavic language (Bulgarian) and an East Slavic language (Russian). The dictionary describes semantic and syntactic equivalents of words between the languages. When completed, the dictionary will contain around 30,000 entries. The principle we build the dictionary on is that every language should be given equal status. Many of our data come from the Parallel Polish-Bulgarian-Russian corpus developed by us as part of the CLARIN-PL initiative. In the print version, the entries come in the order of the Cyrillic alphabet and they are not numbered (except for homonyms, which are disambiguated with Roman numbers). We selected the lemmas for the dictionary on the basis of their frequency in the corpus. Our dictionary is the first dictionary to include forms of address and most recent neologisms in the three languages. Faithful to the recent developments in contrastive linguistics, we begin with a form from the dictionary’s primary language and we define it in Polish. Subsequently, based on this definition, we try to find an equivalent in the second and the third language. Therefore, the meaning comes first and only then we look for the form (i.e. the equivalent) that corresponds to this meaning. This principle, outlined in Gramatyka konfrontatywna języków polskiego i bułgarskiego (GKBP), allows us to treat data from multiple languages as equal. In the dictionary, we draw attention to the correct choice of equivalents in translation; we also provide categorisers that indicate the meaning of verbal tenses and aspects. The definitions of states, events and their different configurations follow those outlined in the net model of verbal tense and aspect. The transitive vs. intransitive categorisers are vital for the languages in question, since they belong to two different types: synthetic (Bulgarian) and analytic (Polish and Russian). We predict that the equal status of every language in the dictionary will facilitate easier and faster development of an electronic version in the future.

Mutual intelligibility between West and South Slavic languages

In the present study we tested the level of mutual intelligibility between three West Slavic (Czech, Slovak and Polish) and three South Slavic languages (Croatian, Slovene and Bulgarian). Three different methods were used: a word translation task, a cloze test and a picture task. The results show that in most cases, a division between West and South Slavic languages does exist and that West Slavic languages are more intelligible among speakers of West Slavic languages than among those of South Slavic languages. We found an asymmetry in Croatian-Slovene intelligibility, whereby Slovene speakers can understand written and spoken Croatian better than vice versa. Finally, we compared the three methods and found that the word translation task and the cloze test give very similar results, while the results of the picture task are somewhat unreliable.

The meaning and interpretation of the Serbian discourse marker BRE

Bre is a word whose origin is neither exclusively tied to the Serbian language, nor is it even derived from the elements of the South Slavic languages. Nonetheless, it has come to serve as a most prominent typically Serbian linguistic item to the extent that a number of people in the social networks in Serbia (e.g. Facebook) have been signed in with the discourse marker bre between the first and the last names, in the place of the middle name (e.g. Jovan Bre Marković).This “small” bre (as Kapor (1989:9) would qualify it with the Serbian adjective malo) – inconspicuous, as it were – has a potential of an important accompaniment to the tune of a Serbian expression, to use a music metaphor. This has presented us with a challenge worthy of a deeper investigation: bre, clearly, contributes to the meaning of an utterance in which it occurs, but the question is what kind of contribution.Working within the relevance-theoretic framework (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/95; Blakemore, 2002; Carston, 2002), we explore the issue of how this discourse marker contributes to the relevance of its host utterance. We conduct our analysis around the cognitive semantic distinction between conceptual and procedural types of meaning and the pragmatic distinction between explicitly and implicitly communicated assumptions by the speaker's utterance.Basing our findings on a corpus collected from Serbian newspapers and magazines as well as face-to-face exchanges, we conclude that bre is a procedural constraint on the construction of a higher-level explicature which expresses a speaker's particular attitude to the addressee.

O toponimičnih izoglosah med ruskim severozahodom in Slovenijo

Prispevek je dvodelen. Prvi del obravnava specifične toponimične paralele v slovanskem svetu na splošno ter med Slovenijo in vzhodnimi Slovani. Ugotavlja se, da precej naselbinskih imen povezuje Slovenijo zlasti s severozahodno Rusijo (Novgorod, Pskov). Navedena področja imajo namreč nekaj podobnosti z vidika zgodnje slovanske naselitve in njihova narečja imajo veliko arhaičnih prvin. Drugi del je etimološka analiza krajevnih imen v severozahodni Rusiji; obravnavane so izpeljave iz slovanskih apelativnih osnov kot * bьrd-, *dъ(b)n-, *kad-/* kadьn-, * kamьn-, *pak-/*pač-, *rak-/*rač-. Vsa obravnavana imena so tipična tudi za Slovenijo in deloma za južnoslovansko področje.

Thoughts on Older Romance Elements in Slovenian and Other South Slavic Languages (Part 1)

This article compares the features of older Romance elements in Slovenian with the features of loans of the same kind in other South Slavic languages. In the first part the author examines vocabulary borrowed into Slovenian and Croatian before the twelfth century, paying special attention to the criteria for differentiating between true and apparent older Romance elements.

Genetic Linguistic Classification of the South Slavic Languages

This article discusses the genetic linguistic classification of the South Slavic languages. It presents the formation of individual South Slavic geolects corresponding to language hierarchical gradation from original South Slavic. At an early stage, South Slavic split into West and East South Slavic; Slovenian and Central South Slavic developed from West South Slavic, and Macedonian and Bulgarian developed from East South Slavic. For each language, the article presents its defining characteristics that delimit it in relation to the neighboring languages and within the area, as well as the model of its linguogenesis.

The discourse marker znači in Serbian

Among the rare treatments of discourse markers in South Slavic languages (Miškovi? 2001, 2003; Fielder 2008; Dedai? and Miškovi?-Lukovi? 2010; Premilovac 2010; Miškovi?-Lukovi? and Dedai? 2012), the Serbian discourse marker zna?i, evolved from the lexical verb zna?iti (‘to mean’), has so far gone unnoticed. Based on a corpus of approximately 6.5 hours of recorded semi-formal student-teacher conversations, the paper analyzes the pragmatic aspects of the discourse marker zna?i. The key questions that are addressed are: (a) what discursive environments zna?i occurs in; and more importantly, (b) what pragmatic effects the speakers intend to achieve by using this discourse marker. The pragmatics of zna?i is explored in order to establish whether in each individual case it is used (a) as a marker of various types of reformulation, such as expansion or compression, (b) as a means of concluding, or (c) whether it serves an interactional function.