Croatian Glagolitic Problem

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Dorian Juric wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> This is going to be a difficult letter to actually type out, but I
> need help with some croatian glagoljica spelling. I'm teaching myself
> to read and write in the script, but I only have one old church
> pocetnica to work with which simply has a direct translation in
> latinica, so if anyone can help me I would be very grateful.
> 
> I'm trying to figure out how best to write out words with the Old
> Slavic character 'ě' (if that doesn't show up it is an 'e' with a
> hacek), which created the three Stokavski subdialects. More
> specifically right now I am trying to figure out how the word
> 'prebijela' would have been written in glagoljica.
> 
> Some of the words in my pocetnica seem to be in ekavski, such as
> mesto... but there is also a character that doubles for both 'ja' and
> 'ě' which could be a candidate. Yet other words seem to conjoin
> vowels much as Proto Indo European would do 'ie for ije'.

If you're looking at old enough texts (before the Croatian dialects 
began to diverge), they should have been written with yat' (Cyrillic Ѣѣ, 
Unicode U+0462, U+0463). The corresponding Unicode positions for 
Glagolitic are U+2C21, U+2C51, but I don't have a Glagolitic font 
installed so I can't select and send those characters.

For the appearance of the characters, see the table here:
<http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2C00.pdf>

> transliterated then, my options would be
> 
> prebiela
> 
> prebela
> 
> or
> 
> preběla/prebjala

I personally like preběla as an ambiguous conventional rendering 
(условное обозначение) of the original sound and all reflexes without 
distinction. If you are referring to a later period when the Croatian 
dialects had already split, it would be appropriate to render those 
forms in the local dialects, would it not? -- perhaps with a notation 
such as "prebjala (<*preběla)."

> I have a .jpg file with glagolitic characters that can more clearly
> clarify my question, but since I can't attach files to these emails
> it will have to be sent outside of seelangs. Any help on this would
> be greatly appreciated.

You might point readers to any of the numerous images available on the 
web. For example, several are shown here, and if you click the 
thumbnails you get larger versions: 
<http://www.croatianhistory.net/etf/et03.html>

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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