The paper deals with and evaluates from a historical and developmental perspective Anton Kosi’s book Sto narodovih legend za slovensko mladino, Ljubljana 1897), which is an edutainment-type narrative work with pious content. A semantic typology is offered of this folkloristic educationally oriented genre, based on an analysis of surface linguistic expression. Prose legends are grouped into seven deep semantic categories which are clarified and illustrated with representative examples. The folk legends collected in the 19th century are, regrettably, not written in a lively, colloquial dialect-rich language. For educational reasons (it was used as school material) Kosi’s edition employed a uniform language characteristic of the literary norm of the Modern, although with functional elements of the poetics of folk literature retained.
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