ACTA HISTRIAE 28, 2020, 4 UDK/UDC 94(05) ISSN 1318-0185 ACTA HISTRIAE 28, 2020, 4, pp. 511-754 UDK/UDC 94(05) Zgodovinsko društvo za južno Primorsko - Koper Società storica del Litorale - Capodistria ACTA HISTRIAE 28, 2020, 4 KOPER 2020 ISSN 1318-0185 e-ISSN 2591-1767 ACTA HISTRIAE • 28 • 2020 • 4 ISSN 1318-0185 UDK/UDC 94(05) Letnik 28, leto 2020, številka 4 e-ISSN 2591-1767 Darko Darovec Gorazd Bajc, Furio Bianco (IT), Stuart Carroll (UK), Angel Casals Martinez (ES), Alessandro Casellato (IT), Flavij Bonin, Dragica Čeč, Lovorka Čoralić (HR), Darko Darovec, Lucien Faggion (FR), Marco Fincardi (IT), Darko Friš, Aleš Maver, Borut Klabjan, John Martin (USA), Robert Matijašić (HR), Darja Mihelič, Edward Muir (USA), Žiga Oman, Jože Pirjevec, Egon Pelikan, Luciano Pezzolo (IT), Claudio Povolo (IT), Marijan Premović (MNE), Luca Rossetto (IT), Vida Rožac Darovec, Andrej Studen, Marta Verginella, Salvator Žitko Urška Lampe, Gorazd Bajc, Arnela Abdić Reinhard Johler, Daniela Simon, Francesco Toncich Urška Lampe (slo.), Gorazd Bajc (it.) Urška Lampe (angl., slo.), Gorazd Bajc (it.), Arnela Abdić (angl.) Zgodovinsko društvo za južno Primorsko - Koper / Società storica del Litorale - Capodistria © / Inštitut IRRIS za raziskave, razvoj in strategije družbe, kulture in okolja / Institute IRRIS for Research, Development and Strategies of Society, Culture and Environment / Istituto IRRIS di ricerca, sviluppo e strategie della società, cultura e ambiente © Zgodovinsko društvo za južno Primorsko, SI-6000 Koper-Capodistria, Garibaldijeva 18 / Via Garibaldi 18 e-mail: actahistriae@gmail.com; https://zdjp.si/ Založništvo PADRE d.o.o. 300 izvodov/copie/copies Javna agencija za raziskovalno dejavnost Republike Slovenije / Slovenian Research Agency, Mestna občina Koper Prikaz novega imperializma in njegovih učinkov na Kitajskem. / Una rappresentazione del nuovo imperialismo e dei suoi effetti sulla Cina. / A portrayal of New Imperialism and its effects in China. Henry Meyer, 1898 (Wikimedia Commons). Redakcija te številke je bila zaključena 31. decembra 2020. Odgovorni urednik/ Direttore responsabile/ Editor in Chief: Uredniški odbor/ Comitato di redazione/ Board of Editors: Uredniki/Redattori/ Editors: Gostujoči uredniki/ Guest Editors: Prevodi/Traduzioni/ Translations: Lektorji/Supervisione/ Language Editors: Izdajatelja/Editori/ Published by: Sedež/Sede/Address: Tisk/Stampa/Print: Naklada/Tiratura/Copies: Finančna podpora/ Supporto finanziario/ Financially supported by: Slika na naslovnici/ Foto di copertina/ Picture on the cover: Revija Acta Histriae je vključena v naslednje podatkovne baze / Gli articoli pubblicati in questa rivista sono inclusi nei seguenti indici di citazione / Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in: CLARIV ATE ANALYTICS (USA): Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Social Scisearch, Arts and Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI), Journal Citation Reports / Social Sciences Edition (USA); IBZ, Internationale Bibliographie der Zeitschriftenliteratur (GER); International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS) (UK); Referativnyi Zhurnal Viniti (RUS); European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences (ERIH PLUS); Elsevier B. V .: SCOPUS (NL); DOAJ. To delo je objavljeno pod licenco / Quest'opera è distribuita con Licenza / This work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0. Navodila avtorjem in vsi članki v barvni verziji so prosto dostopni na spletni strani: https://zdjp.si. Le norme redazionali e tutti gli articoli nella versione a colori sono disponibili gratuitamente sul sito: https://zdjp.si/it/. The submission guidelines and all articles are freely available in color via website http: https://zdjp.si/en/. ACTA HISTRIAE • 28 • 2020 • 4 V olume 28, Koper 2020, issue 4 VSEBINA / INDICE GENERALE / CONTENTS Wolfgang Göderle: Postwar: The Social Transformation of Empire in 19 th Century Europe. Scientific Knowledge, Hybridity and the Legitimacy of Imperial Rule ......................................................... Postwar: trasformazione sociale dell’Impero nell’Europa del XIX secolo. Conoscenza scientifica, ibridismo e legittimità del potere imperiale Povojna socialna transformacija Habsburške monarhije v 19. stoletju. Znanost, hibridnost in zakonitost cesarskih zakonov Francesco Toncich: Istria between Purity and Hybridity: The Creation of the Istrian Region through Scientific Research in the 19 th Century ..................... L’Istria tra purezza e ibridismo: la creazione della regione istriana attraverso l’attivitá scientifica nel XIX secolo Istra med čistočo in hibridnostjo: ustvarjanje istrske regije skozi znanstvene raziskave 19. stoletja Daniela Simon: The “hybrids” and the Re-ordering of Istria, 1870–1914 ................. Gli «ibridi» e il riordino dell‘Istria, 1870–1914 »Hibridi« in reorganizacija Istre, 1870–1914 Bojan Baskar: A Mixture without Mixing: Fears of Linguistic and Cultural Hybridity in the Slovenian-Italian Borderland .............................................. Una mescolanza non mescolata: paure dell’ibridismo linguistico e culturale al confine italo-sloveno Mešanice brez mešanja: bojazni pred jezikovno in kulturno hibridnostjo na slovensko-italijanskem mejnem območju Marijan Premović: Politički odnosi komuna Budve i Dubrovnika od 1358. do kraja XIV . stoljeća .................................................................................... Le relazioni politiche tra il comune di Budva e il comune di Ragusa dal 1358 alla fine del secolo XIV Political Relations of Budva and Dubrovnik Communes from 1358 until the End of the 14 th Century 511 541 577 UDK/UDC 94(05) ISSN 1318-0185 e-ISSN 2591-1767 623 605 ACTA HISTRIAE • 28 • 2020 • 4 Jurij Perovšek: O Dr. Milanu Jakliču in prvem prevodu Komunističnega manifesta v slovenski jezik.............................................................. Dr. Milan Jaklič e la prima traduzione in sloveno del Manifesto comunista Dr. Milan Jaklič and the First Translation of the Communist Manifesto into the Slovene Language Aleš Maver: Med cesarjem in kraljem: lavantinski knezoškof Mihael Napotnik v letu 1918 in po njem .................................................................... Tra l‘imperatore e il re: l‘arcivescovo di Maribor Mihael Napotnik dal 1918 in poi Between an Emperor and a King: The Prince-bishop Mihael Napotnik of Lavant in the Year 1918 and Afterwards Darjan Lorenčič & Andrej Hozjan: Respublika Mörska – Murska Republika, 1919 ............................................................................................. Respublika Mörska – la Repubblica di Mura, 1919 Respublika Mörska – The Republic of Mura, 1919 Gorazd Bajc, Mateja Matjašič Friš, Janez Osojnik & Darko Friš: L'intervento italiano in Carinzia dopo la Prima guerra mondiale e i britannici ................................................................................................. The Italian Intervention in Carinthia after the First World War and the British Italijanska intervencija na Koroškem po prvi svetovni vojni in Britanci 679 645 711 661 ACTA HISTRIAE • 28 • 2020 • 4 605 Bojan BASKAR: A MIXTURE WITHOUT MIXING: FEARS OF LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL HYBRIDITY ..., 605–622 A MIXTURE WITHOUT MIXING: FEARS OF LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL HYBRIDITY IN THE SLOVENIAN-ITALIAN BORDERLAND Bojan BASKAR University of Ljubljana, Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Zavetiška 5, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia e-mail: bojan.baskar@ff.uni-lj.si ABSTRACT This article explores the recent trend of avoiding the terminology of “mix- ing” and “mixture” and accordingly replacing it with the term prepletanje (“interweaving”) in current Slovenian social scientific literature as well as in public language use. The avoidance is especially remarkable in the Slovenian- Italian borderland where the studies of linguistic and cultural contact, of bilin- gualism and multiculturalism are flourishing on both sides of the state border, in particular among the ethnic Slovenians from the Adriatic coast. The paper brings forward evidence of the systematic “mixophobic” nature of this rejection of the terminology and imagery of mixing and hybridization, replacing it with the notion of linguistic and cultural interaction in which interwoven strands can always be separated again, if necessary. Keywords: mixtures (linguistic and cultural), interweaving (linguistic and cultural), hybridity, mixing, Italian-Slovenian borderland UNA MESCOLANZA NON MESCOLATA: PAURE DELL’IBRIDISMO LINGUISTICO E CULTURALE AL CONFINE ITALO-SLOVENO SINTESI L’articolo prende in analisi l’attuale tendenza ad evitare la terminologia relativa alla “mescolanza” sia nella letteratura delle scienze sociali che nel linguaggio pubblico di lingua slovena. Questa terminologia viene rimpiazzata, piuttosto, con il termine prepletanje (“intreccio”). Ciò concerne soprattutto la zona del confine italo-sloveno, dove, da entrambi i lati (in particolare tra gli sloveni del litorale adriatico), prosperano studi sui contatti linguistici e culturali, sul bilinguismo e multiculturalismo. L’articolo porta degli esempi della “fobia della mescolanza”, che sistematicamente rigetta la termino- logia e l’immaginario della mescolanza e dell’ibridizzazione. Al massimo, Received: 2020-03-09 DOI 10.19233/AH.2020.31 ACTA HISTRIAE • 28 • 2020 • 4 606 Bojan BASKAR: A MIXTURE WITHOUT MIXING: FEARS OF LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL HYBRIDITY ..., 605–622 la rimpiazza con la nozione di interazione linguistico-culturale, grazie alle quale gli elementi intrecciati posso pur sempre essere disgiunti nuovamente, qualora necessario. Parole chiave: mescolanze (linguistiche e culturali), intrecci (linguistici e culturali), ibridismo, confine italo-sloveno ACTA HISTRIAE • 28 • 2020 • 4 607 Bojan BASKAR: A MIXTURE WITHOUT MIXING: FEARS OF LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL HYBRIDITY ..., 605–622 INTRODUCTION In this article I explore the tendency of avoiding the terms “mixing” and “mixture” in current Slovenian scholarly literature dealing with linguistic and cultural interactions of the type commonly described as mixing. This avoidance is especially remarkable in Western Slovenia, or more precisely, in the Slove- nian-Italian borderland where the studies of linguistic and cultural contact, of bilingualism and multiculturalism are flourishing on the both sides of the state border, in particular among the ethnic Slovenians from the Adriatic coast, on the Slovenian as well as on Italian side. Mešanje and mešanica, “mixing” and “mixture,” is being overwhelmingly replaced by the gerund prepletanje (“interweaving” or “intertwining”) and the noun preplet (the result of such action). This replacement has generally oc- curred since the independence of Slovenia in 1991. What is perhaps especially striking is the fact that it has taken place in a rather discreet manner, under the radar, as it were. I could not find any trace of scholarly discussion regarding the relative value or use of the metaphors of mixing and interweaving, not to mention an argument in favor of introducing the term interweaving. 1 How the consensus – or just the habit – of using “prepletanje” instead of “mešanje” managed to establish itself with such success is outside the scope of this essay. Surveys of the metaphors and terms for linguistic and cultural mixtures used in relevant Western literature seldom include “interweaving.” Anthropologist Melville Herskovits, for example, who had made great use of a wide range of the metaphors of linguistic and cultural interaction, is a rare exception but he referred to interweaving in only one of his works (Baron, 2003). 2 Other recent Western overviews of the relevant literature do not register its usage at all (e.g., Stewart, 2007; Burke, 2009). 3 This frequent use of the preplet- metaphor may certainly be surprising in an age that is celebrating mixtures, hybridity, fusions and syncretisms. What makes 1 By contrast, this does not apply to those scholars who prefer to use “usual” metaphors for interacting. An excellent case in point is the discussion of the notions of hybridity, mixture, translation, collage, métissage, creolization, transculturation and several others by the group of sociologists and anthropologists working on migrant and borderland identities (Sedmak & Zadel, 2015; Milharčič-Hladnik, 2015; Jurić Pahor, 2015; Janko Spreizer, 2015). 2 Herskovits claimed that it is necessary to sort our African threads amidst a mess of yarn. Elsewhere in his writings about African Americans in the United States, he indicated that the European sources (or “thre- ads,” if you will) are more prominent and easier to identify. The metaphor of rewoven threads apparently represents an interweaving of European and African cultural elements, through acculturative processes, for which “mechanisms” must be adduced (Baron, 2003, 107–108). 3 The sociolinguistic notion of intertwined languages as a very special and rare case of mixed langua- ges, introduced by Bakker (1997), is rather idiosyncratic in its terminology and therefore not suitable for our purpose: “I call this process language intertwining. Basically this is the combination of the grammatical system (phonology, morphology, syntax) of one language with the lexicon of another. Intertwined languages are genetically related to two languages and therefore they do not fit into the family tree model.” (Bakker, 1997, 203). ACTA HISTRIAE • 28 • 2020 • 4 608 Bojan BASKAR: A MIXTURE WITHOUT MIXING: FEARS OF LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL HYBRIDITY ..., 605–622 preplet and prepletanje so different from all of these is that the components (perhaps best imagined as strands), interwoven or intertwined in the preplet, do not blend, do not fuse, do not dissolve: they retain their previous separate identity. The Slovene verb plesti, “to weave, to braid, to ply,” has its origin in the IE *plek-, similar to the Greek plékein, Latin plecto, plectere, English plait, German flechten, Albanian plectö and so forth. There is another verb in Slovene that translates into English as “to weave” and into German as “weben” and that is tkati with its link to the Latin texere. The result of the action is textile (noun), “fabric, cloth”: tkanina and tkivo in Slovene. The meanings of textus (noun) are similar. The English distinction between interweaving and intertwining does not really apply in Slovene since the focal meaning of intertwining (“firmly bind the strands to- gether”) is not metaphorized in Slovene (and for this reason I will consistently use “interweaving”). Both strands, the one originating from plectere and the other from texere, adequately translate as plesti, (pre)pletati, preplet. The avoidance of the terminology of mixing and mixtures is not equally systematic in all relevant disciplinary fields. The two fields that are arguably (see the methodological remark below) most affected by the frequent usage of the prepletanje terminology, seem to be the (socio)linguistic studies of con- tact languages in the Western Slovenian borderland and the Slovene Studies (slovenistika) in general. When it comes to “interweaving of cultures,” also ethnology and folkloristics come in the foreground although most visibly on their margins where the discipline in question is morphing to its applied, didac- tic and divulgated forms. The conspicuous preference for the prepletanje terminology in the Western Slovenian borderland might give the impression that this is a straightforward Italian import. As a matter of fact, the popular notion of intreccio, ‘interweav- ing,” in Italy is very similar to the Slovene preplet(anje). 4 Intreccio di lingue e culture and prepletanje jezikov in kultur, “interweaving of languages and cultures,” is a revered formula in both language communities. (By contrast, the French equivalent “l’entrelacement des langues et des cultures,” as well 4 I am grateful to the Italianist scholar Martina Ožbot Currie for turning my attention to the intreccio metaphor. Fig. 1: The linguist Hugo von Schuchardt, 1842–1927 (Wiki- media Commons). ACTA HISTRIAE • 28 • 2020 • 4 609 Bojan BASKAR: A MIXTURE WITHOUT MIXING: FEARS OF LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL HYBRIDITY ..., 605–622 as “l’enchevêtrement des langues et des cultures,” is a rare occurrence.) I nevertheless have my doubts about the possibility of such an import but I will not go into the issue of origins and possible diffusions here. The bilingual, often trilingual, area around Trieste (Karst, Istria, Friuli) as well as in the city itself, where intrecci and prepletanja are currently flourishing, is the very same area whose linguistic practices and processes had been studied by the famous linguist, Hugo von Schuchardt. German by birth but Austrian in character, Schuchardt was very interested in language mixtures and mixing (Sprach- mischung, Mischsprache). Better known as a pioneer of creolistics, he also established the study of contact languages. His fascinating booklet, titled Slavo-German and Slavo- Italian (Schuchardt, 1884), offered as a gift to the prominent Slovene philologist and linguist Franc Miklošič (Franz von Miklosich) for his 70 th birthday, was based on a rich collection of very heterogene- ous materials, including information provided by his correspondents from the region. One of them was Karel Štrekelj, a linguist and ethnologist from the Karst countryside above Trieste, a specialist for Slovene Karstic dialects and professor of Slavic Philology at the University of Graz at the time Schuchardt was teaching there. 5 Schuchardt offered his book to his friend Miklošič because the latter was also interested in language mixing and the resulting language change. At the time, the leading Slovenian philologists and linguists, regardless of their feel- ings about language mixing, did not avoid the time-honored terminology of 5 In the Hugo Schuchardt Archiv, his letters to Schuchardt have not yet been edited. Http://schuchardt.uni- graz.at/id/letter/5337#_ftn6. Accessed: 3 November 2019. Fig. 2: Schuchardt's booklet, titled Slav- ic-German and Slavic-Italian language, studies the phenomena of language mix- ing in the Italian-Slovenian borderland. ACTA HISTRIAE • 28 • 2020 • 4 610 Bojan BASKAR: A MIXTURE WITHOUT MIXING: FEARS OF LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL HYBRIDITY ..., 605–622 mixing and mixtures. 6 How could they avoid it when Luther himself – a very important figure for the Slovenian nation-builders of the time – had already claimed that alles sprachen sind vermischt? 7 Writing in 1981, a century after Schuchardt’s book, Jože Toporišič, then the leading national linguist, comment- ing on the trend of code-mixing and code-shifting between the Slovene and Serbo-Croatian could still exclaim “But this is the mixing of languages and nothing good can come from it” (Toporišič, 2011, 246). In the region in question, Hugo Schuchardt is still largely ignored. While elsewhere, from the 1980s onwards, Schuchardt has been steadily rediscovered and his rediscovery has prompted a new wave of interesting scholarship on his contribution to the studies of languages in contact, the impact of the “inter- weaving” metaphor seems to efficiently block his rediscovery. 8 METHODOLOGICAL CAVEAT Due to the relative scarcity of a corpora of contemporary Slovene language, ad- ditional techniques and tools had to be used, in particular intense internet searches and long-term systematic observation of the usage of relevant terms. The titles of the social scientific publications and conference presentations, the titles of PhD, MA and BA theses in selected disciplines but also the titles of various events such as museum exhibitions have proved to be a fruitful source. None of them could, of course, replace an extensive reading of relevant philological, linguistic and cul- turological (in particular ethnological) literature in the Slovene language, dealing in particular with the region of my choice but not exclusively. PROMOTING PREPLETANJE IN SCHOLARLY LITERATURE The next step is to present some selected evidence of the avoidance of mešanje by replacing it with prepletanje. I will limit myself to two particularly clear cases suggesting that the promotion of the use of the interweaving meta- phor in linguistic terminology is of a determined and systematic character. 6 Jernej (Bartholomeus) Kopitar wrote thus “[d]a also die walachische Sprache nicht wie die neugriechische nur eine durch die Länge der Zeit in ihren Formen etwas veränderte Original- sprache, sondern eine durch Vermischung zweier in Materie und Form verschiedener Sprachen entstandene Mengesprache ist…” (Kopitar, 1857, 187). 7 “Alles sprachen sind vermischt und unter einander gemenget, denn die Länder sind benach- bart, und eins stösst an das ander; darum borget eins vom andern etliche Wort.” (Luther, 1846, A 578, 569). 8 In the wealth of Schuchardtian studies dealing with the contact languages, I find the following espe- cially rewarding: Baggioni, 1988; Swiggers, 1989; Venier, 2012; 2015; Nicolaï, 2014; 2016. Ethnolo- gists and anthropologists are only rarely aware of Schuchardt’s work but see Johler, 2012. Recently, a selection of Schuchardt’s theoretical texts, also including the book in question, have been translated into French and published in a bilingual edition (Nicolaï & Tabouret-Keller, 2011). ACTA HISTRIAE • 28 • 2020 • 4 611 Bojan BASKAR: A MIXTURE WITHOUT MIXING: FEARS OF LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL HYBRIDITY ..., 605–622 First case Soon after independence, Neva Godini, an ethnic Slovene teacher from the small town of Aurisina (Nabrežina) north of Trieste, published an article about the Central Karstic vocabulary in the time of Karel Štrekelj (1859–1912), the above-mentioned specialist for the Central Karstic (or “Gorizian”) dialects and also her fellow Karstian (Godini, 1994). Štrekelj wrote his PhD thesis under the guidance of Fran Miklošič, the holder of the chair for Slavic Philology at the University of Vienna. By the end of the century, Štrekelj was based in Graz, where he became professor of Slavic languages in 1896. Hugo von Schuchardt, who held the chair for Romance philology at the same university, was already familiar with his contribution to the study of Slavic elements in the Friulian vocabulary (Štrekelj, 1890), to which he reacted in the following issue of the journal with a note, the title of which signaled the problematic of Slavic-Italian mixtures (Schuchardt, 1891). Godini maintained that in the 1990s, the Karstic lexicon was still abound- ing with Germanic and Romance loanwords, though in different proportions than in Štrekelj’s time. In order to illustrate the current linguistic situation of the Slovene Karstic dialect in and around Aurisina, she concluded the article with the local Vagrant’s hymn which “sounds rather archaic but was actually composed only in 1946, when a group of local internees returned from Ger- many. It became so popular that it was later considered a folk song.” To this she added: “In its simplicity, almost naivety, [the song] clearly and tangibly displays the interweaving (prepletanje) of the Slovenian expressive stock with the Romance and Germanic stock” (Godini, 1994, 272). The last two lines of the poem refer to the decrease in the Romance and Germanic loanwords in the new postwar era: Ki su bučardə , špicə, məcuəla in pənčot? Adijo njəmška Micə, oj servus, kristigot! (Where have bučarde, špice, macole and pančoti gone? Goodbye the German Mice, servus, kristigot!) 9 These two lines are so strongly reminiscent of the poem L’Eco del Klutsch that one cannot but suspect that the anonymous author of the “hymn” must have been acquainted with it. L’Eco del Klutsch (The Echo of the Klutsch) 10 was written by the Triestine regional poet Polifemo Acca (his real name was 9 The nouns from the first verse are all Romance loanwords, denoting the tools that were used by the workers in the marble quarry of Aurisina. 10 Klutsch is the name of a brook in Trieste while it also seems to be a Germanized form of the Slovene word ključ, “key”. ACTA HISTRIAE • 28 • 2020 • 4 612 Bojan BASKAR: A MIXTURE WITHOUT MIXING: FEARS OF LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL HYBRIDITY ..., 605–622 Giglio Padovan). In literature on Padovan, 1885 is invariably given as the year of the publication of the song. Curiously, Schuchardt published this sonnet in its entirety a year earlier, without revealing the source, in his book (Schuchardt, 1884, 74). Indeed, he had good reason to publish it in its integral form since the poem offered a fascinating list of Slovene and German, or Slavic and Ger- manic and Friulian, loanwords that Padovan actually considered barbarisms. By exposing them as characteristic of the Triestine idiom, he simultaneously expressed his hope that they would soon be swept away. Unlike the purist Padovan, Schuchardt delighted in this “Barbarisirung [sic] des Triestiner Italienisch” (Schuchardt, 1884, 74) and went on explaining every hybrid word in each line. Just to convey an idea of the poem and to show its similarity to the Vagrant’s Hymn, let me reproduce here the second quatrain of the sonnet: O fraile, o juzche, o mlecherze, o berschizze, Pech, pinter, clanfer, bogneri e sinteri, Cuguluf, presniz , crapfeni e sparheri E zvitichi e giarizzi e cluche e spizze. The two poems address the same phenomenon of Sprachmischung (to put it in Schuchardt’s terms), of the same contact languages in the same linguistic area, here defined as the Italian-Slovenian borderland in and around Trieste, above all Istria and the Karst. The common trait of both poems, enumerating the hybrid words and possibly a common message (though the intent of the Vagrant’s Hymn is not necessarily purist), is that by themselves they prove that ethnic and linguistic boundaries within the area are not an obstacle. Their contact is more a prerequisite for the mixing of languages, consistent with the Schuchardt’s claim that “the Sprachmischung [language mixing] is directly proportional to Berührung [contact], to the level of its daily recurrence, its stability and its depth” (Venier, 2015, 107). Godini therefore studies the same phenomenon as Schuchardt and she stud- ies it in the same region as Schuchardt who actually made it widely known as a region of language contact and mixing (or hybridization). 11 Schuchardt and Štrekelj are the founders of the studies of language contact and mixing in this area, yet Godini had nevertheless turned the central notion of mixing into prepletanje, “interweaving.” She did so without any theoretical supporting argument; even without clarification or a warning that the central notion and thereby the very nature of the phenomenon had been renamed. That this move was far from random, is supported, in the German summary (Zussamenfassung) 11 Schuchardt clearly preferred Mischung to (sprachliche) Hybridität. The latter appears in the book only twice. See Schuchardt, 1884, 10, 35. ACTA HISTRIAE • 28 • 2020 • 4 613 Bojan BASKAR: A MIXTURE WITHOUT MIXING: FEARS OF LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL HYBRIDITY ..., 605–622 of the article, by the German translation of prepletanje with Verflechtungen. 12 The fact that Schuchardt and the whole German speaking tradition used the terminology of mischen, Sprachmischung, Mischsprache, Einmischung, etc., has suddenly stopped being relevant. The Slovene speaking linguists in the area seem to have suddenly felt entitled to overthrow the scientific terminology of another language in an entirely arbitrary manner. Some might of course argue that prepletanje is actually nearly synonymous with mešanje, supporting their argument with various dictionaries that list some meanings of mixing as nearly synonymous with some meanings of interweaving (never before the fourth or third meaning listed in the line). This holds true only for a small segment where some similar meanings of both words meet or intersect. For the rest, this claim is totally wrong. Except for the small intersec- tion where, for example, both the writer sheds light on the interweaving of the folk beliefs with the official Church Creed and the writer sheds light on the mixture of the folk beliefs with the official Church Creed are in line with the standard language, an overextended “interweaving” in place of “mixing” is literally out of place. It is the wrong word for the context: a suitable definition of the catachresis. Second Case In 2014, two scholars from the University of Udine published a book on bilin- gualism in children (Crescentini & Fabbro, 2014a). The publication was financed by the European Foundation for Regional Development and was part of the Pro- gramme for the Transborder Italo-Slovenian Cooperation. This explains why it was simultaneously published in the Slovene translation (Crescentini & Fabbro, 2014b). In the penultimate chapter, the authors (a neuropsychologist and a neu- ropsychiatrist) first introduce mixing (mescolamento) and switching (commutazi- one) of languages as the phenomena characterizing bilingual persons. In the second paragraph of the chapter, they move from switching to mixing, duly maintaining that “il mescolamento delle lingue (code-mixing)” is quite a frequent phenomenon in bilingual people. In the rest of the paragraph, they strictly refer to “i fenomeni 12 “Verflechtungen der slowenischen Sprachelemente mit germanischen und romanischen” (273). Also the translation of “prepletanje” with “Verflechtung” is inaccurate since the latter conveys the meanings of tightly interwoven, interconnected, interdependent, integrated phenomena (this is the reason why l’histoire croisée or entangled history is called Verflechtungsgeschichte in German), entirely absent in the vacuous notion of prepletanje as used by its new practitioners. For the concept of Verflechtung (entanglement) in modern social science, see Christ et al. 2016. ACTA HISTRIAE • 28 • 2020 • 4 614 Bojan BASKAR: A MIXTURE WITHOUT MIXING: FEARS OF LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL HYBRIDITY ..., 605–622 di mixing.” In the Slovene translation, “mescolanza delle lingue (mixing)” from the initial paragraph is correctly translated as “mešanje jezikov (t.i. mixing).” In the second paragraph however, mixing of languages suddenly becomes “prepletanje jezikovnih kodov (t.j. code-mixing),” “interweaving of language codes (i.e. code- mixing)” (Crescentini & Fabbro, 2014b, 46). Mixing becomes interweaving. As mescolamento is correctly translated as mešanje also in the contents of the book, it seems less likely that this surprising switch can be ascribed to an extremely careless translator. It seems more likely that a careless editor, who was implementing the unwritten decree that mescolanza had to be turned into prepletanje, incidentally caught sight of the second paragraph without reading the text in its entirety. What might look like an arbitrary intervention, is most likely indicative of the systematic character of a certain language policing (or censorship) that suppresses mešanje and replaces it with prepletanje. INVADING THE COMMON USE OF LANGUAGE Many more cases of the academic usage of the term prepletanje could easily be found. As mentioned before, they abound especially in the Western Slovenian bor- derland. The center (the capital) seems to be somewhat less affected. However, this does not seem to also apply to non-academic usage. In common use – in particular in advertising in the cultural sphere – the word prepletanje has become irresistible. This trend that I will outline in the following also interferes with scholarly usages where academics have their own reason for using the word. The interference can easily be detected in the titles of university theses such as “Bosniaks in Slovenia: the Interweaving of Language and Culture – the Case of the Bosniaks of Velenje” (a BA thesis). The “fatal attraction” of this word that the current students of ethnology seemingly cannot resist has, in this case, most likely submerged the reasons respon- sible for its introduction in the academia in the Western Slovenian borderland. What things are actually interweaving in this title? Are language and culture of the Bos- niaks being interwoven like two strands? Or is language and culture of the Bosniaks being interwoven with that of their ethnic Slovenian counterparts? Or is there a third, undisclosed possibility? Considering that such a BA thesis as a rule does not show any interest in the issues of language at all, even less in their interweaving or any other known interaction, it is even more obvious that it does not promote “interweav- ing” against “mixing.” Here, prepletanje is just a flatus vocis. Its aim seems to be to evoke “cosmopolitan” images of coexistence. The mainstream media go even further in the same direction. There is an appar- ently rich imagination of the cases of interweaving. One would never expect that so many and so variable phenomena are capable of interweaving but besides naming and enumerating these phenomena, the question as to what precisely is being interwoven and how this interweaving is taking place, is never asked. This means that also the question as to what is actually interweaving and how precisely does it differ from mixing and other similar phenomena is never asked. ACTA HISTRIAE • 28 • 2020 • 4 615 Bojan BASKAR: A MIXTURE WITHOUT MIXING: FEARS OF LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL HYBRIDITY ..., 605–622 Let me briefly illustrate a segment of a wider array of things that can typically in- dulge in interweaving according to the media and advertising (with tourism and travel advertisers as possibly the most “creative” promoters). Here are some examples of things that may be of special interest to anthropologists and linguists, gathered from the web pages: 1) Interweaving of languages and cultures: This is arguably the most popular cliché concerning interweaving: […] it also encompasses the musical traditions of the Eastern Adriatic where the interweaving of languages, primarily Slavic, and cultures, primarily Latin and Levantine, is very conspicuous. 13 While this is an instance of the cultural tourist marketing of a region, the follow- ing case originates from the academic environment of the borderland and shows to what extent the academic communication can be permeated with the language used in advertising: The focus of the conference will be intercultural contacts and the situation of the language and literature at the point of contact since the conference will take place in Nova Gorica, a city where the interweaving of languages and cultures is reflected in everyday life. 2) Interweaving of languages only: From Ljubljana to the quadri-lingual Kanalska dolina (Val Canale), where in ev- eryday life, the Italian, Slovene, German and Friulian interweave in a perpetual and entirely natural process. The tight interweaving of the English and Spanish in the USA has resulted in a special combination of languages, known as Spanglish. The second statement comes close to the proper linguistic statement. However, what about the first one? Are the four languages of Val Canale, like four strips or strands, being woven together into a multilingual braid? Or are they being combined into something? Or, more likely, are they just “peacefully coexisting” alongside one another? 3) Interweaving of peoples/nations: 13 For the reasons of commodity and discretion, this and the following examples, all gathered from the inter- net, are quoted without references. ACTA HISTRIAE • 28 • 2020 • 4 616 Bojan BASKAR: A MIXTURE WITHOUT MIXING: FEARS OF LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL HYBRIDITY ..., 605–622 The week of India’ s culture – One could hardly find in this world a country where so many cultures, nations and peoples are being interwoven […] as in India. The interweaving of peoples mirrors a language mosaic of the predominantly Slavic interior of Istria, consisting of the two Istrian languages, Slovene and Croatian, while the linguistically diverse towns eventually chose the official Venetian Italian as their language. (Difficult to understand anything in this “cryptic” ethnological declaration, in- cluding the direction of mirroring.) 4) Interweaving of “races”: 14 In Asia, diverse races are interweaving. These two pictures show the members of the two predominant races. The writer of the travel reportage blog most likely did not intend diverse races to mix in Asia. They could have simply said that diverse races live (or coexist) in Asia. But why speak in plain language? Yet the Vikings, despite ever more intense interweaving of diverse cultures and races, cannot really go against their football roots. Here, the “interweaving” comes to some extent closer to “interaction”—or even “mixing”—than in previous statement. The interweaving of different cultures and races has given the city a special character. Again, do different races of the city undergo the process of interweaving (what- ever that may mean) or do they just coexist in the city, nebeneinander? 5) Interweaving of foods, cuisines, and tastes: A recipe for beef ribs in coffee sauce: If we envisage coffee as a spice and if we substitute salt for sugar, we get a deli- cious food in which wine and coffee interweave. 14 The term race is put here in scare quotes only for the sake of anticipating and repelling possible criticism aimed at censoring the notion of race. The word race is not inherently evil and today it badly needs a critical analysis of its usage. This is not to deny that the notion of race in the case of the human species (i.e. human race) actu- ally denotes a non-existent entity (since the human species does not happen to be subdivided into sub-species or races). This is also not to deny that talking about human races is outdated, regressive and potentially dangerous. ACTA HISTRIAE • 28 • 2020 • 4 617 Bojan BASKAR: A MIXTURE WITHOUT MIXING: FEARS OF LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL HYBRIDITY ..., 605–622 Another culinary suggestion: Waters also excellently interweave with foods. It is not a coincidence that one finds the most incongruous occurrences of “interweaving” precisely in the domain of foods and drinks (and of liquid and certain non-liquid substances more generally). In our culture, as well as in numerous others, the liquids, and the drinks in particular, are the paragon of the substances that are mixed and that have to be mixed. Don’t we mix water with wine, oil with vinegar, milk with sugar, coffee with brandy, and different wine or spirits among themselves? Don’t we mix different coffees, if we want to get an excellent coffee mixture? WHERE PREPLETANJE REIGNS, NOTHING ELSE GROWS One does not need to google the morpheme -plet- and its different variants for long in order to establish that, in the current Slovene usage, virtually all things, all phenomena, material as well as immaterial, are capable of “interweaving.” This means that the word has undergone a semantic (over)extension. Thus extended, the word is used in a wider sense than is possible in ordinary speech. It acquires meanings that it does not have in standard language. Due to its semantic extension, the frequency of its occurrence in certain sectors of common language use has correspondingly increased. Considered from the point of view of ordinary language usage, there is no need to sound the alarm. The vogue of prepletanje may be seen as a silly fashion. Fash- ions come and go and many of them are silly. Moreover, fun may be poked at those who suddenly discover that wine and coffee are interweaving in the beef ribs sauce. They would not be the first to be ridiculed for their mannerist ways of speaking. Who knows? – someone might find out someday that mineral water and wine are interweaving in the glass of spritzer or gemischt, a drink well-known throughout the Eastern Adriatic as gemišt or špricer. The way things stand, it is quite possible, even likely, that this will happen someday. Consequently, someone might propose that the name of the drink should be corrected accordingly, perhaps into pletenac (in Croatian) or prepletenec (in Slovenian). Intreccio in Italian? The susceptibility of regional scholarly discourses for this invasive catachrestic word is, on the contrary, far from amusing. In anthropology, ethnology and neighbor- ing disciplines, we definitely need to develop deeper historical and epistemological understanding of the metaphors and concepts that we make use of for describing, ana- lyzing and theorizing the most diverse forms of cultural interaction among different collectivities. To do so, we possess an impressive store of concepts and metaphors, some of which are more useful for certain ends, some of which are less useful. In ACTA HISTRIAE • 28 • 2020 • 4 618 Bojan BASKAR: A MIXTURE WITHOUT MIXING: FEARS OF LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL HYBRIDITY ..., 605–622 order to select and evolve optimal analytical tools, we need to work permanently on them. Some of these concepts are also older than others; some even happen to be very old, in particular the concept of mixing and mixture. Mixtures continue to be widely suspected of having unpleasant characteristics, if not being utterly bad. This may arguably be the strongest single reason for their avoidance. Some people seem to find this concept outdated, too old, not sophisticated enough. Anthropologists with their presentist bias are among those most inclined to discard “outdated” concepts. Even those among them who seriously study concepts such as hybridity, creolization, métissage (with its equivalents in the Spanish and Portuguese language), syncretism, (cultural) translation, transculturation, bricolage, and so forth, sometimes seem to lack the awareness that mixing and mixture, too, are concepts and not just plain words. (How many times do mixing and mixture appear in indices of such books?) Even fewer are aware that mixing and mixture, together with some related concepts, were the two concepts intensely elaborated from the very beginning of Ancient Greek philosophy and continuing through the centuries of its development until its end. As Richard Sharvy (1983) has argued, “[q]uestions about mixture and combination were among the most central topics discussed by the earliest philoso- phers.” Aristotle’s thought on conceptual distinctions between mixis (mixture) and krasis (fusion) and some others, as developed in particular in his breathtaking work of philosophy of nature titled De generatione et corruptione, is perhaps the acme of all philosophical thinking of mixtures. Aristotle is also arguably a philosopher whom current anthropologists find the least interesting. Avoiding the systematic and in-depth analysis of the relevant concepts of rela- tions that some prefer to describe in terms of mixtures, others in terms of hybridiza- tion, and others again in terms of creolization or translation or entanglements or bricolage, anthropologists and ethnologists tend to become an easy prey for the predators speaking PC language. Virtually every metaphor or concept from the store can be denounced as “politically incorrect”, “racist,” “xenophobe,” “sexist,” etc. This has happened with hybridity, with mixing, with méstizaje, more recently with creolization. All are made suspect because of their “biological roots,” so the exorcism of everything resembling biology becomes the paramount and often the only one, obligation of the scholar. IN LIEU OF A CONCLUSION: WHAT HAPPENS TO HYBRIDITY? Avoiding the terminology of mixtures (and hybrids) and opting for the rhetoric of interweaving may thus also turn out to be a PC strategy. Namely, if “mixing of languages” is a term bearing a pejorative connotation, then its replacement with “in- terweaving of languages” (or peoples, or cultures, or races) elegantly solves all the problems. Its connotation is highly positive, its message is optimistic; the word itself looks so innocent and untainted and free of any “biology” that nobody could possibly expose it to PC suspicions. ACTA HISTRIAE • 28 • 2020 • 4 619 Bojan BASKAR: A MIXTURE WITHOUT MIXING: FEARS OF LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL HYBRIDITY ..., 605–622 This is not to argue that the fear of the “PC predators” has played a very sig- nificant role here. In any case, in this Mediterranean region the passion for political correctness has been incomparably weaker compared to its North Atlantic birthplace. In my view, it is fear of mixing that is critical: the time-honored perception that mixing is bad but also the fear of losing one’s identity, the fear that a new identity might arise out of two previous identities. Interweaving, on the contrary, is a promise of a happy and colorful “multicultural” future for the diverse linguistic and cultural communities of the borderlands; something resembling a patterned intreccio woven from the threads of vivid colors, or an equally colorful fabric of a pleteni vzorec, or even a wildly optimistic interweaving partying of fabrics and human phenotypes of the United Colors of Benetton. This might help to explain why the devotees of interweaving remain impermeable also to the discourses of hybridity. This resistance is naturally perfectly consistent with the resistance to mixing. However, the thing is that many devotees of interweav- ing and of hybridity work side by side in the same academic institutions, share the same cabinets and the classrooms at the same university departments and publish their articles in the same journals, both in the borderland and, to a lesser extent, in the capital. Considering that the discourse of hybridity, especially in its postcolonial edi- tion, has its reception and enjoys certain popularity also in the borderland, it would be a reasonable expectation that the devotees of interweaving might borrow a thing or two from it. None of that happens, however. Where prepletanje reigns, there is no room for mixtures, hybridity, blends, compounds, and syncretism. This notion is not just one among many equals, all working towards the same goal. The article by Neva Godini on Karel Štrekelj and the Karstic dialects that was discussed above is an excellent illustration of the exclusionary nature of the discourse of interweaving. Godini is totally silent about Sprachmischungen despite the fact that Schuchardt had described the same area as an area of language mixing. The word hybrid nevertheless appears in her article. It appears only once, and this in the foot- note where she comments on the dialectal word tèr for the tower or the church tower (torre in Italian and turn, a loanword from German, in neighboring villages), express- ing hope that it is not “a weird hybrid of the two loanwords” but an autochthonous phonetic development of a Romance loanword (Godini, 1994, 269). A hybrid cannot be but “weird”. This can be seen as a strong signal that the discourse of hybridity (and by extension mixing) should not be mixed with the discourse of interweaving. ACTA HISTRIAE • 28 • 2020 • 4 620 Bojan BASKAR: A MIXTURE WITHOUT MIXING: FEARS OF LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL HYBRIDITY ..., 605–622 MEŠANICE BREZ MEŠANJA: BOJAZNI PRED JEZIKOVNO IN KULTURNO HIBRIDNOSTJO NA SLOVENSKO-ITALIJANSKEM MEJNEM OBMOČJU Bojan BASKAR Univerza v Ljubljani, Filozofska fakulteta, Oddelek za etnologijo in kulturno antropologijo, Zavetiška 5, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenija e-mail: bojan.baskar@ff.uni-lj.si POVZETEK Članek raziskuje sodobno težnjo izogibanja terminologiji »mešanja« in »mešanic« ter njenega nadomeščanja z izrazom »prepletanje« v tekoči slovenski družboslovni literaturi kakor tudi v javni rabi. To izogibanje je posebno očitno na italijansko- -slovenskem obmejnem območju, kjer so preučevanja jezikovnih in kulturnih stikov, dvojezičnosti in multikulturnosti v polnem razmahu na obeh straneh državne meje, še zlasti med etničnimi Slovenci na jadranski obali. Članek prinaša dokumentacijo, ki kaže na sistematično »miksofobno« naravo zavračanja terminologije in podobja mešanja ter hibridizacije in njunega nadomeščanja s pojmi jezikovnih in kulturnih interakcij, v katerih je prepletene niti po potrebi zmeraj mogoče znova razplesti. Ključne besede: mešanice (jezikovne in kulturne), prepletanje (jezikovno in kulturno), hibridnost, mešanje, italijansko-slovenski obmejni prostor ACTA HISTRIAE • 28 • 2020 • 4 621 Bojan BASKAR: A MIXTURE WITHOUT MIXING: FEARS OF LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL HYBRIDITY ..., 605–622 SOURCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY Baggioni, D. (1988): Le débat Schuchardt / Meillet sur la parenté des langues (1906–1928). Histoire Épistémologie Langage, 10, 2, 85–97. Bakker, P. (1997): A Language of Our Own: The Genesis of the Mixed Cree-French Language of the Canadian Métis. New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Baron, R. 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