Slovenian dialectal terms for spoon, knife and fork

Abstract

The article highlights the dialectal names for cutlery used in eating or preparing food - spoon (sln. žlica), knife (sln. nož) and fork (sln. vilica). Since the dialectal lexemes under consideration name three objects with similar but different cultural or ethnographic backgrounds, when investigating the origin of the lexeme we asked ourselves about the connection with the origin of the denotation itself. We also examined the situation in Slovenian dialects with all-Slavic literary-linguistic material. The focus is on linguistic analysis, namely geolinguistic, word-formation- etymological and semanticmotivational. The ethnological framework serves namely to present the reasons for the (non-)adoption of lexemes. It turns out that the denotations for the spoon and the knife are not diverse from the perspective of loanwords, since the denotations have been in use in Slovenian for a relatively long time. The fork was introduced into common use relatively late as part of cutlery, so the most common name for it is a word-forming diminutive, and a high degree of lexeme acceptance is observed in contact with non- Slavic space. The naming for the knife demonstrates word-forming diversity due to different uses in the past. The lexemes nožič (eng. knife), vilica (eng. fork) and razsoška (eng. fork) or plural razsoške (eng. forks) have undergone a word-forming change, since they have received structural suffixes and these are not (any longer) carriers of word-forming meaning, i.e. they are tautological derivatives. The lexemes nož (eng. knife) and pošada (eng. knife) testify to the semantic change, respectively; both have experienced a narrowing of meaning, namely in the direction of hypernym → hyponym.