In the first part of the article, the value of the old vernacular semantically stable legal lexica as the historical source for studying the realia with which it is named is described and illustrated with the example of the oldest recordings of the lexical items pertaining to the word family soditi, gathered systematically from the oldest sources in Slovene (the Freising Manuscripts, Middle Age manuscripts in Slovene, Dalmatin's Bible and from the old multilingual dictionaries that included Slovene). The main research question, i.e. how it was at all possible for some of the oldest vernacular legal lexis to have remained relatively semantically stable until today, is elaborated in the second part. In continuation, suggestions for the oldest reconstructed vernacular namings for paradigmatic legal acts and roles in a court procedure are introduced in diagrammatic form. Two conclusions are drawn. First, the court gatherings of the medieval and early modern autonomous communities are to be identified as the stable semantic environment for the construction of legally relevant meanings, within which, and thanks to the overwhelmingly oral communication (embedded in what some scholars call performative law), some of the old legally relevant lexica could even have undergone a process of terminologisation. Second, and still in the form of a hypothesis for future interdisciplinary research, it is concluded that from among different legally relevant vernacular lexica, it has been those performatives and constitutives that have remained semantically stable, which in their concurrent role as speech and legal acts were inherent to oral legal communication and which are indispensable in any oral court procedure or forming of an oral agreement even today.
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