Original scientific paper
THE LEXIS AND GRAPHICS IN TESTAMENTS FROM KAŠTELA AT THE TURN OF THE 18th AND 19th CENTURIES (249-250)
Krešimir Kužić
; Zagreb
Abstract
The rule of the Venetian Republic, which lasted from 1420 to 1797 on the territory of Trogir and Kaštela, reflected itself in various linguistic influences. The strongest pressure was on the Patrician, which was imposed by the Italian and Latin languages in official activities. The common people needed an interpreter to understand state decisions. It is a fact that the Republic never prohibited the printing of books in the Croatian language, them being of secular or religious character. A proof are Marulić s Judita, as well as numerous works by other authors from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. However, the influence was inevitable in the fields of graphics, which adopted characteristics from the Italian language. At the end of the 16th century the Catholic renewal took place, and at the end of the 17th century it was intensified with the aim of enlightening and improving the religious education of the clergy. The Split archbishops S. Cosmi, S. Cupilli and the Trogir bishop A. Kačić were prominent in this intention. It isvery important to stress out that, although Cosmi and Cupilli were natives of Italy, they never imposed the Italian language, but quite the contrary insisted on the preservation of the Croatian language. Besides the diocesan clergy, especially the Glagolitic one, huge contributions were given by the Franciscans. Owing to them a great cultural homogeneity was created, resulting in inscriptions in the Croatian language, especially seen in village parishes.
Another, even more obvious example are testaments. The author treats the ones from 1788 to 1805. Due to the dialect, they were written in štokavian and only some terms werečakavian. The reason for this is that priests were natives of štokavian territories - Poljica, Solin and Zagora, so they wrote documents in their local idiom modified by religous and secular literature. In those times štokavian predominated in printed works in Dalmatia. Due to the intention to educate in the Croatian language, the texts of testaments bore a relatively small number of foreign words. In the total corpus the percentage of Italian and Latin words is only 3,96%, Turkisms 0,23%. These foreign words are divided in groups: religious, legal, cultural and economic terminology. Due to the legal nature, and the inevitable religious connotation of testaments, it is reasonable that three quarters of the foreign words came from these groups. It is interesting that clothes, jewellery and title terminology are Italian and Turkish origin. The use of Italian terminology for months is quite unusual. Despite the conservative rural milieu, foreign words were accepted because of intensive trading links with Venice, as well as the Ottoman hinterland in Bosnia. The precipitators were people from the local milieu who rose from the rural class, being it by education or some craftsmanship or trading activity. They had to accept the global language of their profession thus contributing the mentioned acceptance.
As far as graphics is concerned, the widest variety was reflected in the writing of palatal sounds. (Č) was written as - c, cc, c, ch; (Ć) - c, c, ch; (Đ) - ch, dg, dj, g; (LJ) - gl, jl; (NJ) - gn, jn, ng, nj; (Š) - ∫, ∫c, ∫s, ss, sc, s; (Ž) - x, s. an explanation to this lies in the fact that there was no authority to impose a unique graphics system, so books were printed at the discretion of the printers themselves who didn’t know the Croatian language. So, the form of graphics of a certain testament depended on the literature the priest used in his job, and the most popular books were Bogoslovje dilloredno by the bishop A. Kačić, and various breviaries. It is clear that during the studied period the knowledge of the Croatian language reached a substantial level, but the problem of graphics remained unsurmounted.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
61894
URI
Publication date:
24.2.2005.
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