Review article
Aporiae in the Editing of Croatian Medieval Texts
Amir Kapetanović
orcid.org/0000-0002-8013-9330
; Institut za hrvatski jezik i jezikoslovlje
Abstract
The paper discusses some of the exigencies of editing Croatian medieval texts: reading, interpreting and publishing them implies a good knowledge of the older linguistic states of Croatian, the interweaving of the three scripts and the dynamic and complex former language reality. In Croatian editing practice to date there have been various approaches to the same problems and challenges of textual criticism.
This paper takes up some aporiae and disagreements and suggests some of the ways in which they might be resolved. The first part (chapters 1 to 3) considers the ways in which the text is taken from source to edition (particularly with respect to the reliability of the transmission of data) and puts forward the main difficulties and possible hesitations at several levels during the transcription of the most demanding Latin texts. These have been grouped into four points: when one grapheme indicates two or more phonemes; when one grapheme signifies a phonemic sequence; when several graphemes are used for a single phoneme; and when the original contains a grapheme that has no phonological value. The second part of the discussion (chapters 4 to 5) considers several recent publications of Croatian medieval texts and focuses on the transcription procedures in which palatals are distinguished from consonantal clusters without liaison and the resolution of the Glagolitic / Cyrillic grapheme jat. It is shown that without exception the solution of each jat grapheme through the italicised je has no grounding in philology or linguistics, and that without the employment of knowledge from historical grammar and historical dialectology it will be hard to obtain reliable readings (transcriptions) of older Croatian texts.
Keywords
Croatian; Middle Ages; textual criticism; transcription; Latin script; jat
Hrčak ID:
180472
URI
Publication date:
21.4.2017.
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