The Prehistory and Areal Distribution of Slavic *gъlčěti ‘Speak’

Abstract

Razprava podrobno obravnava zemljepisno razvrstitev in pomenski razvoj leksema *gъlčěti v južnoslovanskih narečjih, tj. na področjih z migracijsko poselitvijo. Zastavlja tudi vprašanje o prvotni povezavi med jezikovnimi skupnostmi, v katerih se je leksem razvil v glavni izraz za pojem 'govoriti', in sicer v južnoslovanskem pa tudi v širšem slovanskem kontekstu. Posebna pozornost se posveča bolgarščini in vzhodni slovenščini, ki izpričujeta ta razvoj. The paper examines in some detail the diatopic distribution and semantic development of *gъlčěti in South Slavic, i.e., the Slavic dialect areas settled by migration, and raises the question of the nature of the relationship among those dialects that have developed *gъlčěti as the primary neutral verb meaning 'speak' both in its South Slavic and broader Slavic contexts. Special attention is given to Bulgarian and Eastern Slovene dialects, which share this development. 0 Slovenski jezik-Slovene Linguistic Studies 6 (2007) гълчу 'кричать', гълчание 'шумъ, крикъ', гълка 'шумъ, мятежь' (Срезневский 1893: 611). The verb shifted to the meaning 'speak' in a subset of Slavic dialects, currently attested in three disparate regions of Slavic-northern and central Russian dialects and, in the South Slavic area, Bulgarian and Slovene dialects, a semantic shift that is paralleled in a number of cases both at the Indo-European and Slavic levels. The lexeme is lacking altogether in the BCS standard languages, notwithstanding similar-sounding verbs gúčati,-čīm 'say the sound "gu", babble', gúkati, guče 2 'coo' (< *gou̯ k-, cf. Ru dial. гучать, Sk hučat'; Ru гукать, Sk húkat'), and all but marginally in the dialects associated with them. With regard to Russian dialects, the verb голчaть means 'говорить' in northern Russian dialects north of Moscow from Novgorod to Kostroma to Vladimir; голчить has the same meaning in a wider band running from north to south in a crescent-shaped area around Moscow from Vologda to Voronezh; in virtually all of these areas both forms also mean 'кричать' (ЭССЯ 7: 190; Даль I: 366; see Map 1). Material for the words that are of interest to us here have not been collected systematically for the Slovenski lingvistični atlas (Vera Smole, p.c.), currently in preparation. This is not surprising, given that govoriti is generalized for most of the Slovene territory and the areal of *gъlčěti has long been known to be associated (exclusively?) with the Pannonian Slovene dialect. Perhaps for the reason just mentioned there is no discussion of the lexeme in isolexical studies that include the Slovene territory prominently (e.g., Neweklowsky 1987, Куркина 1992). The word is mentioned in passing in Tolstoj's lexical analysis of the South Slavic area in support of a view that South Slavic may be divided into peripheral and central zones, with Slovene and Bulgarian lying towards the peripheries, contrasting with the Western vs. Eastern division going back to Kopitar and Miklosich. A partial listing of Tolstoj's lexical items is given in Table , where PS forms are given i...

Migration of Alpine Slavs and machine learning: Space-time pattern mining of an archaeological data set

“…the southern part of our study area. The hypothesis states that this dichotomy, together with the -ny- || -nǫ- isogloss, "can be viewed as inherited pre-migration cleavages" [ 53 ], that is, "the dialects of Slavic brought to the subalpine area… differed (amongst themselves)" ([ 6 ]; translated from the Slovenian by B.Š. ; the subalpine area mentioned corresponds approximately to our study region).…”

“…To this end, we have been careful to consider only information from each field that has not been influenced by findings from another field. For example, in the Discussion we consider linguistic information [ 53 ], but disregard the conclusions drawn on the same subject matter using supporting evidence from archaeology [ 54 ]. We also take care to include only interpretations reached by domain specialists, as reinterpretations by non-specialists can be problematic [ 6 ].…”

“…the southern part of our study area. The hypothesis states that this dichotomy, together with the -ny-|| -no ˛-isogloss, "can be viewed as inherited pre-migration cleavages" [53], that is, "the dialects of Slavic brought to the subalpine area. .…”

Antemurale innovationis: Clausal complementation in the Slovene Mura River (Prekmurje) dialect and its Balkan parallels

“…There are at least some reasons to think this might be the case, as the Prekmurje dialect (including its literary and standard varieties) is in many respects an anomalous dialect of Slovene (Greenberg 2013). It is distinct from the neighboring Kajkavian Croatian dialect, and it has been noted to have similar innovations as those in geographically non-contiguous speech varieties further to the east (Ivić 1958: 30 with respect to BCMS; Schallert and Greenberg 2007 with respect to Bulgarian). In terms of location, we might have expected Prekmurje to pattern with the erstwhile "Pannonian" Slavic space, where we find, for example, common dialect innovations (dating to the 11th c and earlier) crossing from the northern tier of South Slavic (Slovene, Kajkavian Croatian) into West Slavic, notably Slovak (see Krajčovič 1974: 142-149, 314-318;Greenberg 2000: 40-41).…”