La parlata di Slum

SINTESI
 Nell'articolo si presentano le caratteristiche fonetiche, morfologiche e lessicali della parlata di Slum, un paese della Ciceria nei pressi del confine con la Slovenia. Fra le caratteristiche fonetiche sono presentate le vocali e le consonanti del dialetto, i mutamenti e i fenomeni ad esse collegati, nonché i riflessi di alcuni suoni protoslavi. Fra le caratteristiche morfologiche sono presentati sostantivi, aggettivi e pronomi e la loro declinazione, i verbi con le rispettive coniugazioni, i tempi e i modi. Infine, nell'ambito delle caratteristiche lessicali sono elencati i nomi di varie parti del corpo, di piante e animali domestici.

Parole chiave: dialettologia, fonetica, riflessi di suoni protoslavi, Ciceria, Croazia, Slum

 

THE IDIOM OF THE VILLAGE OF SLUM

Nataša VIVODA
HR-52420 Buzet, Goričica 24

SUMMARY
 The article presents some of the more significant characteristics regarding the idiom of Slum, a village in the Čičarija district, which is due to its geographical position cognate to the Slovene language. It also attempts to establish which language group the idiom of Slum belongs to, namely, does it contain more Čakavski or Slovene characteristics. In the end it was manifested that like all other idioms of Buzet this one, too, belongs to the group of Čakavski languages, for it has more Čakavski distinctions, although the Slovene language characteristics cannot be excluded in view of the fact that the Slovene language reaches into this district as well. The idiom was studied in the field with the aid of a native speaker. The article is divided into three parts.

The first part presents some phonetic characteristics of the Slum idiom, i.e. its syllables. It attempts to discover whether the Slum idiom has the same syllables as the Croatian literary language, whether it knows some new syllables, and whether it has lost any syllables from the literary language. Vowels, and particularly consonants, are presented separately. The pronunciation of these syllables is also described, as well as modifications occurring together with them. It was established that the Slum idiom contains more vowels than the Croatian literary language, for it possesses the open and closed e and open and closed o, which is one of the characteristics of the Slav languages. As far as consonants are concerned, it became clear that the Slum idiom possesses the same consonants as the literary language, and it is interesting that the consonant lj has been preserved, which the Čakavski languages do not possess at all. The author of the article also followed the reflexes of some ancient syllables that were in use in the pre-Slavic language but do not exist any more. Most interesting here is the reflex of the ancient syllable jat, which it turned out to be Ekavsko-Ikavski. In the second part of the article some morphologic characteristics are presented. Considering that morphology covers a very extensive field (it studies the types of words and their changes), some of its most significant spheres are presented herewith: vowels and types of declension, adjectives, their declension and comparison, the most important types of pronouns and their declension, verbs and their conjugation, as well as their tenses and moods. It was established that the Slum idiom knows fewer verb tenses than the Croatian literary language, for it no longer uses the aorist, imperfect and plusquamperfect. There exist the same declension types as in the literary language, but the prolongations are more and more often not the reflexes of the pre-Slavic declension prolongations but were taken from the literary language. Some unaltered words are also stated.

The third part presents some lexical characteristics of the Slum idiom, i.e. a part of the language fund, namely: the terms for parts of the body and head, for domestic animals, plants (varieties of grain, fruit, flowers and trees). Considering that the Slum idiom has been invaded, the same as all other languages, by the increasing number of words from the literary language, at least some old Slum words were attempted to be saved from oblivion in this way.

In the article the author dealt neither with accentuation (each word is marked only with the position of the stress but not its type) nor with the etymology of words, which means that these issues remain open for some further investigations in the future.

Key words: dialectology, pronunciation phonetics, reflexes of the pre-Slavic syllables, Čičarija, Croatia, Slum