Original scientific paper
From Dictionary to Text (in the Collected Works of Marko Marulić)
Dragica Malić
Abstract
This essay has its point of departure in the recognition of the extraordinary importance of the publishing project entitled the Collected Works of Marko Marulić, issued by the Split Writers’ Circle, and, given the fact that the Croatian works of Marulić are of particular importance for the Croatian cultural audience, that it is probable that at some time or other the volumes will be reprinted. Accordingly, work should be devoted to making sure that the second edition should be as good as it may be in terms of text, that it should be as close as possible to the original writing of Marulić. This is an attempt in the direction of this approximation. The whole of the editorial work in the Collected Works is not called into question - what is at issue are some of the details, but they are often essential for the determination of the subtleness of Marulić’s poetic procedures and his use of the standard or literary language; that is, they can draw attention to transcription derivations from the original text of Marulić. And it is these that cannot be unambiguously resolved. The causes for this lie in the variations in the Latin graphy of medieval Croatian, which is a combination of various graphic systems, the con-sequence in turn of the co-existence of different graphic schools of scribes. Medieval Croatian Latin graphy was thus characterised by two basic features. One of these is its graphic lack of differentiation - there are few phonemes in it that are always recorded only by a single grapheme (either by a single letter or by several), and there are few graphemes that register just a single phoneme. A second essential characteristic is that loanwords from Latin or Italian (and those taken on via these languages) were first written in the original graphies (or in that which the given individual scribe, according to his own knowledge, held to be original), irrespective of the degree of domestication of the given word. Marulić most prob-ably wrote with a single and constant graphic and orthographic system of his own, but for the moment there are no extant Marulić’s Croatian autographs, and every transcriber had idiosyncratic graphic and orthographic habits, which would have inevitably intruded into his job as a transcriber. The consequence of this are the various interpretative doubts and hesitations or wrong readings that have no underpinning in the linguistic reality of the time.
In this essay, the author - pursuant to her own insights and current under-standings of the features of medieval Latin script - has put forward her observations about the errors that have made their way into given readings (interpretations) of Marulić texts, observed while reading the dictionaries alongside given Croatian works in the Collected Works of Marko Marulić. These dictionaries were compiled on the basis of the readings of the editors of the separate volumes, who clearly did not have a full insight into all the characteristics of the medieval Ro-man script ( and the problems to which these characteristics could give rise. The errors brought out by these dictionaries are, at the least, twofold. One thing is the problems connected with the resolution of the graphies of the individual text (hand-written or printed), while the other is those problems related to clear scribal (transcriptional or printing) errors, which the editors of the text did not notice. To determine many facts, graphic and linguistic, for Judita, a very important aid is Moguš’s Dictionary of Marulić’s Judita of 2001, which gives examples and numbers of verses, and hence can be checked out in the first printed edition and in the transcription in the Collected Works; however, for other texts, there are no such aids, for the dictionaries added to them give only frequency data and the confirmed morphological forms of the words.
As for the errors that derive from interpretation of graphy some relate to loan words, which are usually written in the original graphy (or close to the original) irrespective of the degree to which it is domiciled. And it is this degree of domiciliation (in phonetics, word formation and morphology) that shows that words written such as deuotia, deuotiun, angel, angelski, uangelie, uangelschi... should be read and hence written in a domiciled version, i.e., devocija, devocijun, an’jel, an’jelski, van’jel’je, van’jelski... And so instead of Israel, israelski, Jerusolim/ Jerosolim, jerusolimski/jerosolimski, Esau, Mojses... the reading should be Izrael, izraelski, Jeruzolim/Jerozolim, jeruzolimski/jerozolimski, Ezav, Mojzes... Then, the initial h, occasionally that between vowels as well, often has a zero phonetic value (a graphic manner influenced by Latin graphy), and thus if we read histina, honim, himiti, humorenie, huminie - istina, onim, imiti, umoren’je, umin’je, then there is no reason for humiglien, humiglienie, humiglienstuo not to be umiljen, umiljen’je, umiljenstvo (irrespective of the phonetic and semantic similarity with the Lat. humilis), and proper nouns such as Hieronim, Hierosolim... will not be Hijeronim, Hijerosolim but Jeronim, Jerozolim.... Graphic ambiguity/polysemy also creates problems in interpretation, particular in the consonantal sequence s - z - š - ž, graphic overlaps in the marking of the consonants l/ļ n/ń, and the consonant v and the vowel u (for which the common graphemes are u/v/V), which is particularly important in the interpretation of the adverbial-prefixal v/v-, or u/u, the manner of marking j and so on. In Marulić’s language, on the basis of the prevailing graphy, a reflex ar has been determined for syllabic r, then individual (or only) examples with er in the transcription of a given work need not be rendered as er because they derive from the transcriber’s differing scribal practice. And so on. Real scribal and printing errors in the models used for the transcription of Marulić’s Croatian works are a different kind of problem, for the editors have not noticed them or have trusted the originals, as if they exactly reflected the Marulić autograph or Marulić’s language.
In conjunction with a fair amount of dubious examples, which are still in need of close contextual and linguistic consideration, in conjunction with the omission of examples that might be the consequence of contemporary printing errors, as examples of such undoubted errors of fact (irrespective of how thy were arrived at) we can quote as the most glaring: among the proper nouns Karah instead of Karan, Zamata instead of Sarmata in Judita, Panici instead of Panuci(j) in Dijaloški i dramski tekstovi, while of ordinary words they are probably haraš instead of harač, the present participle tikući, the hardly intelligible skanje in Pisni, and vručac, posvit, primeno in Dijaloški i dramski tekstovi. The author is a proponent of the view that undoubted errors (in graphy or in fact) should be corrected in transcriptions, and dubious examples that are hard to understand should be re-searched in all seriousness so that there should be as few unclarities in Marulić’s texts as possible.
This study refers to some of the problems that should be dealt with in future transcriptions of Marulić’s Croatian works, visible from the accompanying dictionaries in the Collected Works. Naturally, these dictionaries are not the only indicators of quandaries encountered by interpreters of Marulić’s texts. On the other hand, this study is an attempt to draw attention to the need to set up common viewpoints among editors and associates in the solution of problems that are encountered in the editing of Marulić texts for publication, which should then, in editions such as the Collected Works of Marko Marulić, be employed in all the works.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
11904
URI
Publication date:
22.4.2007.
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