Jezik i grafija krajišničkih pisama
Language and graphics of border regions' scripts

Author(s): Lejla Nakaš
Subject(s): Phonetics / Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Lexis, Sociolinguistics, South Slavic Languages
Published by: Slavistički komitet BiH
Keywords: border regions; Bosnia and Herzegovina; graphics; Bosnian language;
Summary/Abstract: Aft er Bosnia had fallen under the Turkish rule, literary language of the Middle Ages disintegrated into Serbian Church-Slavic in orthodox, and štokavian vernacular in Catholic cultural circle. Traces of the medieval language are also infiltrated in the early expression of Bosniaks, written in national language, particularly in the corps of the letters which originate from border regions. Th is should mean that Bosniaks are its inheritors too.But, a lack of objective parameters in previous research of the mentioned letters, brought to extra-linguistic assessments and arbitrary judgments of the issue who were the scribes of those letters. Considering the crucial importance of the scribes in the final shaping of language expression, the question of the scribal authorship of Bosnian border region letters emerged as a problem that should be solved through firm criteria deriving from the very letters, their language particularity, graphic solutions and orthographic customs.Th e establishment of criteria which would refer to the letters themselves is even more indispensable since the researchers, who represented /defended the stand on Bosniak authorship, based their arguments mainly on assumptions deriving from motifs of folk epics as well as on last traces of the existence of bosanic literacy in the 20th century.In this research four criteria are isolated for determining authorship,which relate to the influence of the usage of Arebica on bosančica: diacritical dots on letters, existence of only one grapheme for /č/ and /c/, mixture of graphemes for /u/ and /o/ and euphonious consonant groups.

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