Abstract
The Linguistic Contribution of Moravian Pitch Books
The contribution will focus on the linguistic impact of pitch books, black books, or blood books originating from the 16th to the 18th century. The core of these collections of legal admonitions consists of confessions made on the torture rack, recorded by a scribe on loose sheets directly in the torture chamber, and subsequently transcribed into the book or simply inserted into it. Due to legal regulations requiring scribes to faithfully record the confessions of offenders, the entries in many places take on the character of direct speech, specifically the speech of ordinary people from lower social strata. These documents thus represent an exceptionally valuable source for diachronic linguistics. The contribution will introduce the "genre" of pitch books and present partial results of research examining the language of these sources from the Moravian context.