Using material originally collected for the monograph Expressions relating to arable farming and viniculture in Slovene Istria (Knjižnica Annales 26), the author attempts to cast light on the terminology in the Istrian-Slovene dialect connected with cereal crops, the tasks associated with them and the diseases to which they are subject. The aim is to ascertain the extent of the use in this field of Slovene expressions, which are in any case firmly established, in particular in reference to
traditional farming implements and work, while at the same time extracting technical terms derived from Romance languages and analysing them in terms of: a) the source of Romanicisms, bearing in mind six layers of language; b) the need for loanwords and doublets; c) the frequency and use of Istrian-Slovene Romanicisms (specific, technical and emotionally coloured terms and their distribution from a semantic point of view); and d) the transformation of Istrian-Slovene Romanicisms at the phonological and word-formation level. On the basis of a close analysis of multi-layered Istrian-Slovene dialect terminology, including a comparison with standard Slovene, the paper reveals the hitherto unimagined linguistic diversity of Slovene Istria.
|