# Slovenian: |ć|



## TriglavNationalPark

MOD NOTE: Moved from THIS thread.



Prijatelj said:


> Sandra Križanec is from Osijek, which is in the easternmost part of the country. In Croatia, the rule is, the further you go to the North-West (deeper in the area of the Kajkavian dialect), people have a harder time distinguishing č from ć and đ from dž - which literally culminates in Slovenia where they only have č and no đ nor dž.



While that's true for standard Slovenian, some western Slovenian dialects do have the phoneme /ć/ (but not the grapheme *ć*, of course) and they differentiate it from /č/.


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## DenisBiH

TriglavNationalPark said:


> While that's true for standard Slovenian, some western Slovenian dialects do have the phoneme /ć/ (but not the grapheme *ć*, of course) and they differentiate it from /č/.



I would love it if you could post an audio/video clip of one of those western Slovenian dialects in the dialect thread.


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## TriglavNationalPark

DenisBiH said:


> I would love it if you could post an audio/video clip of one of those western Slovenian dialects in the dialect thread.



I'll see what I can do, but usable clips of smaller Slovenian dialects are surprisingly difficult to find online.

In the meantime, here's a page written partly in the Resian dialect (the only western Slovenian dialect with a standardized written form, spoken in Italy) where *ć* even appears as a grapheme -- here in the word *već*:

http://rezija.com/en/circolo-culturale-resiano-rozajanski-dum/pubblicazioni/


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## DenisBiH

Thanks. 

The reason I asked is because I believe I've heard/read someone, perhaps Istriano, say that Chakavians distinguish between č and ć but that they don't articulate them the same way as the standard prescribes, so I wonder what the actual pronunciation is in those western Slovenian dialects. Are those dialects you're referring to close or adjacent to Chakavian Croatian area?


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## TriglavNationalPark

DenisBiH said:


> Thanks.
> 
> The reason I asked is because I believe I've heard/read someone, perhaps Istriano, say that Chakavians distinguish between č and ć but that they don't articulate them the same way as the standard prescribes, so I wonder what the actual pronunciation is in those western Slovenian dialects. Are those dialects you're referring to close or adjacent to Chakavian Croatian area?



The area extends broadly from the Slovenian-Croatian border in Istria (i.e., where Slovenian is indeed adjacent to Chakavian Croatian), through the Primorska region -- HERE is a list of words starting with /ć/ as spoken in Dekani -- all the way to Venetian Slovenian dialects in Italy and the Resia Valley in the Alps. There are gaps in between; for instance, I just read that /ć/ has merged with /č/ in the Brda region of westernmost Slovenia.

I know very little about phonetics, but to my ears, the /ć/ as used in Primorska sounds somewhat softer than its standard Croatian counterpart.


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## Morana_

If you are really interested, Denis, perhaps this can help: http://www.astrum.si/view_doc.php?view_doc=67


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## DenisBiH

Thank you both for the links and answers! 

I wonder, what does Slovenian linguistics say about this merger in Slovenian? When and how did it occur?


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## TriglavNationalPark

I'm pretty sure Rado Lencek's _Structure and History of the Slovene Language_ talks about this, but I don't have the book. (It's available from some university libraries.)


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## DenisBiH

TriglavNationalPark said:


> I'm pretty sure Rado Lencek's _Structure and History of the Slovene Language_ talks about this, but I don't have the book. (It's available from some university libraries.)



Thanks for the info. I'm looking at the preview of "Language Contact, German and Slovenian" by Donald F. Reindl on Google Books and it contains an interesting comment in the discussion on the loss of ć.


> It has been observed that South Slavic languages that have peripheral consonants (i.e., /f/, /x/) tend not to have certain medial consonants (i.e., /tç/ and /dj/). Perhaps other pressures contributing to the *maintainance of /x/* (cf. §§4.3.5, 4.3.9) inadvertently contributed to the loss of /tç/ and /dj/.



*Note 1*: The author seems to use /tç/ to represent ć, but the IPA symbol is /tɕ/.
*Note 2*: This may have a close parallel in BCMS. East Herzegovina dialect, which in general keeps the distinction between č and ć, is notorious for the loss of /x/ or its change into other sounds. Muslim speeches of Bosnia-Herzegovina, that seem to blur the distinction between č and ć and merge the two, are on the other hand notorious for maintaining /x/. I'm using the religious label on purpose here, to avoid any confusion.


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## TriglavNationalPark

I just checked Fran Ramovš's _Kratka zgodovina slovenskega jezika_, originally published in 1936, and this is what he says:

1.) the original Slavic *t'* became *ć* by the 11th or 12th century,

2.) This *ć* became *č* (except in westernmost Slovenia) at an undefined time "in the first developmental period of Alpine Slavic."


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