Cvetka's Slovenian Theory Thread

[Battler]

I had not lived in Slovenia for fifty years so I am not aware that the youth in Ljubljana had adopted this 'pudgurski' speeč, spoken in my youth, and even before me for hundreds of years.

I may be wrong and it may be a feature of the Lower Carniola dialect rather than Ljubljana. My father was from Ribnica but I don't recall how he pronounced "ljudje". So you may be correct on this one.

You say, there is no Slovenian suffix -or, how about major, kolodvor, zapor, odpor, napor, prapor .... I don't think Slovenians used the word DARITELJ in the 15th century, so the foreign writer who wrote VM, would have to invent the word for the one who gives offering from the word DAR.

Yes, but that's not an -or suffix, and also not of shared etymology. "Major" is from Latin where -or is a productive suffix, it's a comparative, the rest are Slavic, and are derivatives of the verbal suffix -perti. But it hasn't been a productive suffix probably ever since Proto-Slavic split into all the various dialects.

The imperative for DAJ was most likely DJ which a foreign writer would write as DY, because J was not yet in use. The vowes in such phonetic words were inserted later.  There were no books written in Slovenian before the VM, and the Stična Codex was certainly not in public display.  No peasant in Dolenjska would even today say DAJ.

But it has a vowel in literally every other languag and most other Slovenian dialects - day in Russian and Ukrainian, da in Italian (from Latin dā), daj or dej in the Littoral or Primorska dialect of Slovenian spoken here in Koper but also in Gorica, etc. The vowel also appears in all the other verb forms, including in Slovenian, eg. dati, Russian dat', Latin dō.

I am not discussing Venetic language, but the medieval Slovenian language, which was close enough to Czeck, so that I could understand most of the manuscript, written in Czeck in the middle of 15th century.  There is a lot that there that could help me understand certain things in the VM, that for today sound strange, like the absence of letter G.

Only some dialects of Slovenian back then had h instead of g, and their descendants today retain that feature. One example is the Gorica dialect spoken by our current Prime Minister Dr. Robert Golob, hence why he's been nicknamed "Holob", which sounds very close to the Czech "Holub" which was the family name of one of my classmates and good friends ijn primary school.

Now, given the Ghibelline merlons in the Voynich manuscript, there's a distinct Italian influence, if the Voynich Manuscript is indeed in Slovenian, then I'd put it in the part of Slovenia with at the time the most Italian influence - the municipalities of Koper (Capodistria), Izola (Isola), and Piran (Pirano), then in the Most Serene Republic of Venice, where the towns were majority Italian but the surrounding rural henterland was majority Slovenians. Now, some rural dialects here retain the h instead of g still today, but the Imperative of dati is daj or dej, never dj or dǝj. In fact, the traditional Littoral dialect coalesces the /e/ and /ɛ/ into /ɛ/ and /o/ and /ɔ/ into /ɔ/, and most dialect also coalesce /ǝ/ into /ɛ/, giving us /pɛs/, /tɛrst/, etc. So the imperative in question would be /daj/ or /dɛj/, with a strong preference for the former due to the influence of "dai" from Italian.

The other likely area would be the area around Karst and Gorica, there, /ǝ/ is indeed common, in fact, there's a lot coalescence into it, I recommend listening to Iztok Mlakar's pronunciation to see a very good example of that kind of speech. But given how common /ǝ/ is there, I would expect it to be written down. The reason Slovenian doesn't write the /ǝ/ before the r, is because we adopted the Gaj alphabet which never had a letter for that, but we did very clearly write it down in the earlier Bohorič alphabet, where it was written down as "e": Terſt, pert, zhert, pervi, terk, peſ, etc. I wouldn't even exclude, based on this, that it was, in fact, pronounced /e/ or /ɛ/ at some point, which would make the Adriatic Sea Coast speech more archaic in that regard - in Czech, for example, except for before the r (where they have syllabic r instead), they do have e there - pes, etc. But the Slovenian Gaj alphabet does still write the /ǝ/ when it's not before r - we write pes, not ps.

Now, in old Slavic, this was short i (ĭ / ь) and short u (ŭ / ъ) - pьsъ, pьrvъ, etc. So the reduction is a subsequent development mostly limited to Czech, Slovak, and the South Slavic languages. Polish has pies, pierwszy, etc., Ukrainian has pes, pershyj, Russian has pyos, pervyj, etc.

So specifically for Slovenian, I would expect that the older a written document is, the less reduced the sounds would be. The next step from there is identifying the most likely area of origin, what dialects are spoken there today, and therefore, what the dialects spoken there at the time were most likely to sound. And from what I see, the only match to your criteria (h instead of and dǝj instead of daj) and the Italian influence seen in the manuscript itself, are the Gorica and Karst dialects.