Hornjoserbska rěčespytna terminologija
Upper Sorbian linguistic terminology

Summary/Abstract: This article deals with the development and use of linguistic terminology of a minority language in the context of bilingualism. Under this aspect, an overview is provided over the development and use of Upper Sorbian linguistic terminology past and present. Only recently, a Sorbian-­language passage on the orthography of this tongue at the end of the 17th century was discovered. This establishes the oldest linguistic text in Upper Sorbian so far identified. As far as is known, the first two linguistic termini used were introduced by Z. Běrlink in his treaty of the Upper Sorbian orthography (1689), that is samohłósny ‘vowels’ and sobuhłósny ‘consonants’. Until the 19th century, grammars of Upper Sorbian were written in German and Latin, which means that the use of linguistic termini in this tongue was mostly restricted to their designating function and were in most cases equivalents of the lexical itmes ‘vowel’ and ‘consonant’. This article also deals with varying current questions of the existing linguistic terminology, for example, its stability, its currency and its applicability. In this context, the contribution to the information­question system of the Slavic linguistic internet forum iSybislaw and its developing dictionary of Slavic linguistic keywords is also described.

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