Читать книгу The Alphabet of Discord - Giustina Selvelli - Страница 15

2.5 Some peculiarities related to the characters of the Abecedar

The Abecedar was a text of forty pages: the first part corresponded to the primer proper, in which the letters were illustrated by pictures and examples; in the latter half some parts of speech and eight short reading texts were presented. Since, as mentioned above, the Greek government defended the position that the Slavophones in Greece were neither Bulgarians nor Serbs, but rather a specific nationality, the committee working on the primer opted for a variant of Croatian latinica, thus rejecting both the Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet and the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet reformed by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić. The Latin alphabet used for the manual consisted of 29 letters, two of which were digraphs. Two of the characters devised by the commission were unique and corresponded to phonemes not represented in the modern Macedonian alphabet of 1945: the <î>, for the Bulgarian mid back unrounded vowel <ъ>, and <ü>, which indicated the palatalization of the previous consonant.

Miletich pointed out that the letter <ü> was introduced to indicate the sound corresponding to the Bulgarian Cyrillic letter <ю> (Miletich 1925: 230), as for example in the word lülka (люлка in Bulgarian—swing). The scholar rightly remarked that the commission in this case had preferred to adopt the German alphabet letter <ü>, instead of the digraph “ju” coming from Croatian latinica (expressed by the Bulgarian Cyrillic grapheme “ю”) (Sagiaksis, Lazarou, & Papazahariou 1925: 37).

The authors of the Abecedar introduced a further innovation: instead of using the single grapheme <r>, which is characteristic of Croatian latinica (as a semivowel or syllabic consonant, as occurs, for example, in the word “drvo”—“tree”), they decided to transliterate into Latin characters the Cyrillic combination <ър> of the two sounds involved. Thus, they represented the correspondent of the Bulgarian Cyrillic letter <ъ> separately, through the use of a letter coming from the Romanian alphabet, <î> (similar to the muted <ı> which would have been adopted shortly afterwards in the new Turkish alphabet). Consequently, in the Abecedar, the word for “tree” is “dîrvo.” The same <î> designates the Bulgarian character <ъ> in the word sînceto (= слънцето in Bulgarian, p. 37). In the texts in the Abecedar we can also observe that the authors indicated the specific Macedonian consonant rendered in its contemporary Macedonian Cyrillic version through the character <s> with the digraph <dz>, as well as today’s Macedonian Cyrillic letters <ќ> and <ѓ> with the digraphs <kj> and <gj>.

There are many other interesting aspects with reference to the letters in this manual, first of all the fact that the order of the letters is not exactly logical. The letter <b> is followed by <e> and not by <c>, undermining at the very beginning the title Abecedar itself; the letter <e> is followed by <v>, a fact which could prompt us to think that the authors were attempting to devise a new alphabetical order. The order of appearance of the 29 letters is in fact as follows:

dž

This is then contradicted by the order on the last page of the first section (p. 34), which follows that of the Latin alphabet:

dž

If we take a closer look, however, we note that there are 28 letters here, and therefore one is missing: it is the letter <î>. In short, there is a lot of confusion in this text, and the errors do not stop here.

As a general consideration, it is important to remark that, in the process of the creation of a new writing system, all efforts should be aimed at minimizing ambiguity while maintaining maximum simplicity for users (cf. Venezky 1977: 41-42). The work performed by the Greek linguists in designing the alphabet for the Slavophones in Aegean Macedonia was actually quite advanced on the purely technical (and theoretical) level, especially for the modernization of the language’s transcription system. This is true especially in comparison to the Bulgarian alphabet of the time, in which some letters that corresponded to mere orthographic archaisms remained (cf. Guentcheva 1999: 359).9 The latter made this writing system therefore not strictly phonemic, that is, based on the principle of “one letter, one sound.”

The combination of two or more letters to represent a single phoneme is generally considered, especially from a Cyrillic perspective, to be one of the major shortcomings of the Latin-based writing system (Wellish 1978: 47); in the case of the Abecedar, this element is certainly not the most important problem, as the obstacles to literacy in the Slavic-speaking community emerge in much more significant imperfections appearing in the text. In his review, Miletich cites a long series of examples from the pages of the primer in which words appear to be spelled incoherently, and notes that these inaccuracies represent a clear act of outrage by the Greeks against the Bulgarian script (Miletich 1925: 232).

It appears that the authors of the Abecedar did not pay too much attention to details and neglected the correct use of the writing system they had developed, probably due to a lack of time and attention, but perhaps also, one could assume, due to their own inability to handle a Latin alphabet they had not mastered very well. In this way, they undermined their own linguistic work and jeopardized the possibility of success for the use of the new alphabet by the target population, if that was indeed the goal of their efforts. According to Fishman (1977: xv), the creation of a new script becomes relevant only “insofar as it leads to the acceptance and implementation of the writing systems.” In our case, the decisions that taken in the Abecedar seem rather to indicate of a lack of will and seriousness in planning alphabet reform.

Подняться наверх