They are the earliest preserved writings in Slovenian
Slovenian? Of Slovenian provenience, surely, but what makes their language Slovenian?
If the language of the earliest Bulgarian manuscripts can be called "Old Bulgarian", even though modern Bulgarian is based on a somewhat different set of dialects, then the language of the Friesing Texts can fairly be called "Old Slovenian". I believe Auty's reader calls them such as well.
Posted by Christopher Culver at April 26, 2007 09:53 AMChristopher,
I suppose so, but it still sounds pretty fishy, especially considering that a) Freising Manuscripts are copies of pre-1000 texts (9th century, IIRC) and to speak of anything but dialects of Old/Common Slavic at that time is strange; and b) the high number of Western Slavic features in FM which suggest it was composed elsewhere.
It strongly reminds me of the ridiculous claim that the Kiev Folia actually represent the earliest stage in the development of Slovak.