Terms for Documents in Medieval Bosnian and Hum Administrative Texts

Abstract

This paper examines the lexemes denoting the terms for documents used in medieval Bosnian and Hum offices. The corpus of medieval Bosnian and Hum administrative texts begins with the Bosnian Kulin Ban’s charter of 29 August 1189. It is the oldest legal written monument of the medieval Bosnian office, which will become a model for other documents coming from the same period and area. Medieval Bosnian and Hum Cyrillic documents give us numerous language analysis opportunities, especially synonyms and synonymic sequences. The scope of work shows a series of terms for documents originating from Bosnian and Hum offices. Thus, in 133 medieval Bosnian and Hum Cyrillic administrative texts, from Ban Kulin’s document from 29 August 1189 to the Vlatković brothers of Hum in 1493, terms such as hrisovulь, kniga, listь, pismo (pisanie, upisanie, zapisanie, zapis) and povelê were used. The paper attempts to explain the mentioned earlier lexemes and their similarities and (or) equivalence, the mirror image from the same temporal, spatial and stylistic lexis. Documents are at the core of the Bosnian and Hum offices. In addition to history, they offer an abundance of other information, such as language, script, and in this case, the terms for the documents.