GLAGOL OSVETITI U ZAKONIKU O RUDNICIMA
THE VERB OSVETITI IN THE MINING CODE

Summary/Abstract: Enacted in 1412 by Serbian Despot Stefan Lazarević, the Mining Code came down to us in two versions, a Cyrillic copy made in the late 16th century and a Latin-alphabet transliteration from 1638, as well as in several translations into Ottoman Turkish. Since the publication of its Cyrillic version in 1962, it has been recognised as a highly valuable source for the history not only of law and economics, but also of the Serbian language. Its linguistic relevance consists not merely in displaying traits of an early dialectal development and rendering a lot of terms borrowed from the Middle High German language of the “Saxons” (Sasi), settlers who after the second half of 13th century triggered the development of the mining industry in medieval Serbia: moreover, it provides the first attestations of many genuine words of spoken Old Serbian, some of them probably calqued on German patterns. One of these words is osvetiti of the Cyrillic version, apparently identical to Old Serbian osvetiti ‘sanctify; impose a legal sanction; revenge’ < Common Slavic *obsvetiti, but making no sense in the given context. Yet in the Latin version it occurs twice written with å rendering e (“yat”), which points to *obsvetiti ‘to light up (the mining gallery)’, and such an interpretation seems contextually plausible. If it is true, we have in the Mining Code the single attestation of osvetiti in Serbian outside of the texts written in Church Slavonic. In the vernacular, the verb was replaced by osv(ij)etliti, partly because in the ekavian speeches it became homophonous with osvetiti.

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