Linguistic Analysis of the Sermon Govorenije na mladoij misi from the Collection of Glagolitic Texts by Ivan Berčić

Abstract

The sermon Govorenije na mladoij misi [Sermon at the First Mass] is one of the manuscripts that belongs to the Berčić’s fund of Glagolitic texts (fund 67), which is kept in the National Library of Russia (Saint Petersburg). This collection is the largest collection of Glagolitic texts outside Croatia; it contains over 80 units, of which the most numerous are sermons, according to genre criteria. One of them is the sermon Govorenije na mladoij misi [Sermon at the First Mass] (Berčić’s fund 67, MS 38), listed in the catalogue of the Collection under the name Prva propovijed mladog svećenika (Pervaâ preach svâśchennika) [First Sermon of a Young Priest] and written in cursive Glagolitic script in the 18th century. Although the time of this text’s creation has been determined, the author remains unknown, which makes it difficult to identify its origin. Therefore, this paper tries to examine as precisely as possible where this sermon was written by analysing the graphics and especially the language of the text. Hence, the aim of this research was primarily to provide a description of the script and language and then, mainly through language features, to try to determine the origin of the manuscript, as there is no information about where Berčić found it. The results of the linguistic analysis indicate that the text was written in the area of the Štokavian Ikavian dialect, and a further assumption is that it is most likely from Zadar hinterland. In addition, noticeable innovations in the declensions of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives testify to modernization of the language and the movement towards forms that are most similar to today’s standard. At the same time, this research complements the knowledge gained in previous research about the Croatian language in the 18th century, as well as about the Croatian Glagolitic script, in which many texts were written from the 14th to the late 19th century, many of which have not been processed scientifically or professionally.