Копаонички говор : Етногеографски и културолошки приступ

THE KOPAONIK SPEECH ETHNOGEOGRAPHICAL AND CULTURAL APPROACHES Summary Kopaonik is Serbia’s highest and largest mountain. It is situated between the Ibar, Aleksandrovačka Župa and the Kosovo Basin. It runs in a north-south direction, reaching almost a hundred kilometers in length, and its highest point is Pančić’s Peak (2017 m). The largest part of the Kopaonik area is inhabited by the Serbs, and the population gravitates towards several greater settlements, like Brus, Kuršumlija, Kosovska Mitrovica, Leposavić and Raška, positioned on the brims of Kopaonik. The municipalities on the southeastern side of Kopaonik (Podujevo, Vučitrn, Priština), belonging to the Kosovo-Metohijan region, are nowadays ethnically almost entirely inhabited by the Shqiptars. After the civil war in the SFR Yugoslavia, its breakdown, and the subsequent NATO occupation of the southern Serbian province, Kosovo and Metohija, the internal boundary between the central part of Serbia and this province has been gaining more prominence as the state and ethnic border between Serbia and the self-proclaimed state of Kosovo, i.e. Albania. Thus the Kopaonikans, like on many other occasions in history, have again become Serbian frontiersmen, living on the frontier, i.e. on the Serbian border. The Kopaonik area has long been a mystery to Serbian philology, but the very first research indicated that the central parts of the Kopaonik speech were part of the Serbian Kosovo-Resava dialect. Research then showed that the Kopaonik speech type, including the territory to the northeast and to the West Morava, demonstrated a high degree of territorial compactness. Moreover, the geographical configuration of the Kopaonik area also made it possible for this territory to preserve numerous linguistic archaisms at various linguistic levels (accentual, phonetical, morphological, etc.). They include, for example, the old Serb acute accent (e.g. ključ, pasulj, kamenje, deveto, pričam, platim), originating from the processes of accentual metatony, a more consistent ekavian substitution of the old sound yat (e.g. in the present: nesam, nesmo; comparative: topleje, pametneje: dative/locative prodo se Amerike, radio u Rusije), syncretism in the genitive and locative plural (cf. locative bio po četnika, pri)čam o konja) and similar. A series of linguistic traits like these are also present in mediaeval Serbian monuments written in these parts (e.g. in Dušan’s Code, or in the Code on the Mine by Despot Stefan Lazarević). In the lower Kopaonik zones, which are exposed to large-scale migratory encounters, we can notice the linguistic traits that relate these speeches to the adjacent dialects, first and foremost to the Zeta-Sjenica and Prizren-Timok dialects. For that reason this study registers them both as western influences (e.g. ijekavisms, jekavian jotation), and southeastern influences, among which there are a large number of so-called Balkanisms (increasingly analytic declensions and comparisons, supplanting of the infinitive, etc.). Although the inventory of Balkan phenomena in this dialect has a considerable distribution, certain morphological features, like the process of neutralisation between the instrumental and locative cases (e.g. ide onom brdom, po kim ga beu pratili), offer direct evidence of the mechanisms through which the analytisation of the local case system is carried out. A broad spectrum of Balkan traits also indicated the possible presence of other Balkan peoples and their languages in this area, i.e. the elements of a specific linguistic and cultural symbiosis in some zones. It is a fact that the very area of Kopaonik was a favourable place of residence to various cattle-breeding peoples (e.g. the Vlachs or the Sarakatsani). Even some phonetical traits of the Kopaonik speech (like the sporadic diphthongisation of long central vowels, phonetic elisions) directly or indirectly point to a possible connection to the Romanised Old Balkan population. The cattle-breeding lexis speaks in that favour as well (e.g. sugare / sugarče, kopilče, ikra / ira), and a developed group of nouns for bovine cattle derived from the root balj- (Balja, Baljos, Baljoško, Baljko, Baljuga, Baljuša). In other aspects like, for example, coalmining, the Kopaonik area has been attractive to many distant or neighbouring peoples since antiquity (the Celts, and especially the Romans). Almost throughout the Middle Ages many mining furnaces operated in this region, yielding a large income to the Serbian state. A large number of recorded place-names in the Kopaonik area reveal a semantic motivation of mining-geological type (e.g. žuti krš, Zlatna čuka, Zlatorija, Srebrenica). Kopaonik miners also preserve to this day in their cant a group of archaisms, among which there are old Germanisms handed down from the Saxon miners (cf. aušpil, kilavica, štilo). The area covered by Kopaonik is a particularly rich spiritual treasury of the Serbs. The mountainous isolation where local folk life took place, no matter how far it was brought about by the inauspicious social-historical setting, made it possible, on the other hand, to preserve the old ethnic and cultural characteristics of the local Serbs at the turn of the third millennium. Thanks to its commanding peaks and rich ore deposits, the Kopaonik massif easily preserved old mythological conceptions among the inhabitants. Christian consciousness, testified by numerous monasteries and churches and other places of worship throughout the Kopaonik area, easily expanded that groundwork. Many local beliefs and customs are related to the preservation of tradition and collective consciousness of the local Serbs. That is certified by the rich Kopaonik lexis (e.g. zavet, zakon, dr`at, poštovat, čuvat), and by place-names as well, in which we can clearly see the socialhistorical milieu of mediaeval Serbia (cf. Caricki breg, Kne`evo, Kne`evica, Trgovište, Gradac). However, the lexical material also testifies to the patriarchal milieu in which the Kopaonik population used to live, within their extended families, the so-called family communities (zadruge). All until recently in this entire area, a whole system was in use of pet names and expressions from the field of kinship terms related to the names that the newly wedded bride gives to the household members, participants in the zadruga, for example to her brothers-in-law, husband’s sisters or brotherin- law’s sisters. It is a rich, sociolinguistically structured and stylishly nuanced vocabulary which also appropriated a group of archaisms (e.g. milodever, šećerdever, milozava, deverzava, dikozava, milocveeće, dikocveće, lepodika, ranodika). This area also testifies to an abundant folklore, cultivated especially in earlier times. The long-standing presence of decasyllabic epic poetry is indicated by the dispersion of decasyllabic lines in various folkloric forms, even in common speech, within bywords and phrases. The preserved gusle cult makes it additionally credible. The situation of oral lyric poetry is somewhat different. Although this corpus has not been sufficiently researched, the few recorded songs (mostly amatory, familial, entertainment and ritual songs) are the offshoots of a copious folk endeavour that remains within the confines of Serb folkloristic tradition. These songs contain numerous motifs which testify to the past times and old Serbian state. The songs feature Tsar Dušan, Prince Lazar, Miloš Obilić, Janos Hunyadi, Prince Marko, Karageorge Petrović, and other stock epic motifs, related to Kosovo, Kruševac, Belgrade, Budim, Salonica and Constantinople. There are many motifs of these songs that reveal something of the local population’s way of life – for instance, cattle-breeding, agricultural, social, ritual and other motifs. The brigandage motif (cf. Nikad nije gora bez ajduka) is also part of traditional Kopaonik sociohistoric realities of life, in which it is not difficult to discern the warrior-mythological component. In its linguistic-stylistic traits, for example, the use of standing epithets, etymological figures or Slavic antithesis, Kopaonik poetry is a direct descendant of old Kosovo-Metohijan poetry. It has already been ascertained that the Kopaonik-Metohijan area had a speech more closely related to the Dinaric group of Serb speeches, which makes it more understandable to find a series of linguistic similarities between the Kopaonik speech and Serb folk songs of Karad`ić’s cultural circle. Those congruences are present at various linguistic levels, first of all at the levels of phonetics, morphology and syntax, which is also followed by numerous congruences at the derivational and lexical levels. Perhaps this closeness between the poetry of Kopaonik and that of the western regions was realised not only through proximity, but also through direct contacts, or even through a common Serb linguistic substrate, but also partly through a primaeval desire to have oral artifices united in peculiar linguistic and poetic codes. That seems to explain many thematic and stylistic-linguistic congruences between these folkloristic corpora. The point at issue is the unifying, supradialectal linguistic elements taking part in the formation of a peculiar poetic language (cf. Greek koine), familiar to the Balkans since the time of antiquity. The traces of such a language in the Kopaonik area are also indicated by ijekavisms in local poetry, which apparently in the past functioned more widely as parts of the local stylistic inventory. Used in the ekavian folkloristic milieu, they point through their function to the poetic characteristic of the text, having often an important role in securing the required metric form (e.g. nosite li lijepu devojku, i bijelim lebom naranile, ide li mu vijernica ljuba). Therefore it is not surprising that even the heterogeneous peoples of this part of the Balkans, in their cultural and folkloristic integrations – also have Serbisms of this type (cf. Serbian |ever in Shqiptar folk songs)