ЈЕЗИЧКЕ КАРАКТЕРИСТИКЕ ЛАЗАРИЧКИХ ПЈЕСАМА У КЊИЗИ ОБИЧАИ И ПĬСНИ ТУРЕЦКИХЪ СЕРБОВЪ ИВАНА СТЕПАНОВИЧА ЈАСТРЕБОВА
THE FEATURES OF FOLK LANGUAGE IN THE LAZARICE SONGS IN THE BOOK “ОБИЧАИ И ПĬСНИ ТУРЕЦКИХЪ СЕРБОВЪ” BY IVAN STEPANOVIČ JASTREBOV

Summary/Abstract: The book “Обичаи и пĬсни турецкихъ сербовъ” written by the Russian diplomat, scientists, and historian Ivan Stepanovič Jastrebov, to whom the Serbian nation is much indebted for all he did during his stay in office in Prizren – on two different occasions, between 1870 and 1886 – is primarily a monograph of the ethnographic type. The texts of 500 songs – intact or just parts of them, mostly written in the decasyllabic poetic meter, or to a lesser extent, the octosyllabic, nonasyllabic or even heptasyllabic meter (especially the lazarice songs), describe the individual customs of the population of Kosovo and Methonija and the neighboring territories of western Macedonia. A part of the volume is dedicated to the descriptions of customs related to the Christian calendar (the patron saint days, Christmas, the Epiphany, Đurđevdan, Lazarice, etc.) – in this paper we focus on the lazarice songs. They represent the first relevant records of folk speech of the two Serbian dialects in Kosovo and Metohija: most of the songs have to do with the area of the Prizren-juznomoravski dialect, and a smaller number of them refer to the Kosovo-resavski dialect in and around the city of Peć. As the author himself states in the preface, he attempted to record the songs, using the guidelines set down by Vuk Karadžić, as precisely as possible, and to preserve the source pronunciation. The authentic nature of the dialects recorded can be determined by comparing them to the more current dialects of the area in which the lazarice songs first emerged. Even though Jastrebov indicated that he had recorded the oral traditions of the Serbs as he heard them in the field, considering his limited knowledge of the Serbian language, and especially folk language, we in this paper, by analyzing several phonetic ana morphosyntactic features, asked ourselves the question whether all the songs belong to the same original dialect or whether some have been permeated by non-indigenous linguistic features.

• Details
• Contents