This paper will cover Slovenian Protestant translations of the Bible in relation to the Catholic translations. During the Catholic era in the 17th and first half of the 18th century the Catholic priests started to reach for Protestant books due to the lack of Catholic handbooks: Hren, the bishop of Ljubljana, based the lectionary (1612) to a great extent on the translation by Dalmatin, and thereby has a direct association with traditional Slovenian Protestant writers. Jurij Japelj, the first translator of the complete catholic Bible (1784), also based the translation of the New Testament on the translation by Dalmatin. In the 19th century Slovenian translators begin to rediscover Slovenian archaic and etymological verb forms testified in Slovenian Protestant translations of the Bible during the 16th and 19th centuries. Contemporary Slovenian Catholic and ecumenical translations are abandoning archaic verb forms due to the large impact of Slovenian prose and because of discouraged use of archaic verse in grammars.
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