This contribution aims to give a scholarly and human profile of the Italian Slavist Sergio Bonazza (1938-2021), recently passed away. Bonazza was born in a Slovene-speaking village nearby Triest to a ...mixed family. He studied in Venice and Vienna, where he started his activity as a researcher in the field of Slavic studies history, especially in the Austro-German and Italian contexts of the 19th century. His academic career unfolded mostly at the University of Verona, but also in Naples, Udine and Vienna. In 1987 in Udine, he was assigned the first chair of Slovene studies out of Slovenia. Gifted with a strong personality, he touched on a wide variety of concerns in different fields of Slavic studies, overcoming academic and cultural stereotypes, and often opening up new perspectives in the fields of history of Slavistics, Slovene culture and literature, Austro-Slavism, Slavic-Italian cultural relationships, Glagolitic writing in Eastern Italy, and more. Bonazza is well known as a specialist in the scholarly biography of the prominent Slavist Jernej (Bartholomäeus) Kopitar, to whom he devoted his best works, including a monograph.
Stored in the National and University Library in Ljubljana under the signature mark Cod. 24, Kopitar’s gospel is one of about thirty preserved texts of the Bosnian Church Slavonic literacy. The codex ...was written in the second half of the 14th century under the auspices of members of the Bosnian Church, but soon after the fall of the Bosnian Kingdom it was preserved in an Orthodox monastery, where its original appearance was changed by reparations and adjustments to suit the Serbian Orthodox Church liturgy.The philological analysis of this relatively well-preserved codex imposed itself as a research task whose results should provide the most important knowledge about the codex itself and the process of editing its text at all levels of realization, as well as the position of the manuscript in relation to the Church Slavic canonical and the Bosnian group of codices.The entire codex, which is by all features – codicological, graphetic and linguistic – a typical representative of the Bosnian tradition, was more or less carefully written in the Bosnian Cyrillic by one scribe. The majority of medieval Bosnian religious texts were written in the same type of this version of the Cyrillic alphabet, which, along with lapidary and office script,represents a version of the Western Cyrillic script.Orthographic features of Kopitar’s gospel are shown in adhering to the Bosnian spelling tradition, which follows the oldest Old Church Slavic matrix, primarily the Glagolitic script, which is confirmed in the solutions of ambivalent values of individual letters. In addition to their true values, the letter ѣ has the value /ja/; the letter е serves as the value /je/ in the initial and post-vowel position; letters л and н entail the values /ĺ/ and /ń/; whilethe letter jerv only had the value /đ/ for the scribe of Kopitar’s gospel. Aslight distance from the Bosnian spelling tradition can be assumed in amore frequent use of ligature ѥ.The language of Kopitar’s gospel marks the breakthrough of dialectal innovations from the Western Shtokavian base. Besides Ikavian as a distinguishable feature of this literacy which is in Kopitar’s manuscript massively present and most likely indicates the Ikavian organic idiom of the scribe, other western features are also registered in the codex: the reflex/j/ < *dj, and, rarely, the reflection of the group va < vь. Furthermore, in the entire codex, other linguistic features are recorded, which testify about the condition of the Shtokavian speech during the second half of the 14thcentury, such as the vocalization of the semivowel u /a/, the reflex /u/ < vь,etc. Since there are no examples in the codex of changing the final l > /o/which is found in other Bosnian gospels written at the end of the 14th and the beginning of the 15th century, this leads to the conclusion that the time of writing of Kopitar’s manuscript could be moved towards the middle of the 14th century.
The Slovene national movement of the late nineteenth century was based primarily on the myth of an eternal linguistic community, an essentialist position within historiography. The national ...development itself best fits into patterns described by Hroch and Gellner. Although most objective conditions for national constitution were met by 1929, it is not clear if subjective ones had been met by that time. World War II revitalized the nation-constitution process, particularly by warring Communist- and Catholic-supported political and military factions, both claiming to fight for a Slovene identity, while Communists also claimed to be fighting for a “Greater” (Megali) Slovenia. With the war's end, and Slovenia becoming a Yugoslav republic and expanding geographically, there was no doubt of a Slovene national identity, as understood by Connor, among the general population. However, important developments followed in nation-constitution after 1945, particularly upon gaining independence in 1991. The process need not be considered completed. Slovenes may be considered leaning towards a cultural type nation, with a cultural nucleus in an essentialist understanding of the Slovene language.
The paper answers the key questions regarding Ravnikar-Zupan's translation of the Pentateuch: why it remained in the manuscript, when it was translated and who is its translator. The translation is ...first placed in the wider socio-cultural situation by presenting the attitude of the Catholic Church towards the translation of the Bible in the first half of the 19th century and shedding light on the functioning of state and church censorship. By evaluating the correspondence between the members of Zois's circle who participated in the creation of the translation, the questions of authorship and the year of creation of the translation are addressed. In contrast to the current practice, which addresses the translation as Ravnikar's, it is shown that it is more correct to speak of Ravnikar-Zupan's translation, since it is clear from the letters between Kopitar, Zupan and Zois that Ravnikar did not translated the Pentateuch himself. The letters also show that the entire translation of the Pentateuch was completed in November 1812. In the last part of the article, by analysing a few lines of the first chapter of the Genesis in both versions of the manuscript, it is shown that the R1 manuscript depends on Japelj-Kumerdej's translation solutions, which mostly fully or partially summarizes it, and also on Dalmatin's translations solutions. It is indicated that in the case of manuscript R1, the translators did not start from scratch, but rather, similar to their contemporaries, adapted the biblical text of already existing translations. The same applies to manuscript R2, but to a lesser extent and with a greater dependence on Dalmatin, which also exhibits specific linguistic characteristics evident in Ravnikar's printed books.
Das vorliegende Buch "Differenzen und Interferenzen" ist eine Sammlung wissenschaftlicher (slavistischer) Studien, die vom Autor im deutschen bzw. englischen Sprachraum bereits veröffentlicht oder ...vorgetragen wurden. Als Ganzes ist es jedoch den südosteuropäischen Themen zugeordnet, wobei sich die einzelnen Beiträge konsistent in drei Problemkreise einordnen ließen. Der erste Kreis zeichnet sich durch grundsätzliche theoretische und literarhistorische Texte aus. Der zweite Kreis gilt den Fragen der Entstehung der Slavistik als einer wissenschaftlichen Disziplin und der Problematik, die ihr durch die vielseitigen Aktivitäten J. Kopitars auferlegt wurde. Den dritten Kreis bilden jene Texte, deren Thematik auch ein breiteres Lesepublikum anzusprechen vermag: die Entstehung und Entwicklung der slovenischen Literatur.
According to 19th-century philologist Jernej Kopitar, elite literary traditions and modern written languages originated in folk literature. Leading Slovenian intellectuals of his day, however, ...including poet France Prešeren and linguist and critic Matija Čop, favored classic poetic forms reminiscent of the Italian Renaissance. In Slovenian literary history, Kopitar has remained a figure of secondary importance; nonetheless, his role in other South Slavic cultures was preeminent. We examine several attempts to revert this tendency and to ascribe to Kopitar, and not only to Čop, a leading role in Slovenian nation-building.
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