TECHNICAL, LITERARY AND CORRESPONDENCE SLOVENE LANGUAGE OF FRANC PIRC

Abstract

The missionary and fruit grower Franc Pirc wrote and published in Slovene different types of texts, particularly handbooks for fruit growing, poems and letters. It can be seen from the style of writing, forming of texts and use of language means that he aspired to educate in religion and fruit growing, as well in technical texts as in poems. Pirc’s poems are actually prose texts, formed in verses with rhythm and rhyme. In his poems, Pirc used mainly words typical for religious texts. In the fruit growing manuals he wrote down and preserved technical terms used in Carniola. For novelties in fruit growing he presumably created some new terms: posodovci, pritlikavci. There are very few Germanisms in his texts. More noticeable is the positioning of the verb at the end of the sentence. Pirc as well as Franc Mihael Paglovec derives from the tradition of the Carniolian version of literary language; yet the influence of spoken Carniolian language, particularly the writing down of vocal reduction is with him much stronger. A comparison with the first edition of the Kranjski vrtnar (1830, 1834) and the revised edition (1863), which the publishers modernized linguistically, reveals linguistic tendencies of the second half of the 19th century (moving of the verb from the end to the middle of the sentence, clearing out Germanisms, semantic distinction of use of the modal verb moči to morati, treba je, moči, use of unreduced forms, particularly the infinitive).