Reflections of Church Slavonic – Croatian diglossia on the Baška tablet: a new contribution concerning its language and linguistic layers

Abstract

he paper discusses the linguistic layers of the Glagolitic text of the Baska tablet (cca. 1100 AD), which is considered the oldest textual monument of Croatian language and literature. This text is placed in a wider sociohistorical (1.1) and linguistic context (1.2, 1.3). Following a brief description of the Baska Tablet and a review of the most important literature (2.1), our discussion turns to the question of the tablet’s foundational linguistic layer (Old Croatian or Church Slavonic) and the thesis concerning the Croatian Church Slavonic language of the text. The argumentation for this thesis is considered and disputed. It is impossible to determine with complete certainty which linguistic data from the text belongs to either of these two Slavic languages, since the basic lexis of both Old Croatian and Church Slavonic is Proto-Slavic in origin. It is possible to identify only some exclusive characteristics of one idiom or the other in the text, and Church Slavonicisms in this highly stylised epigraphic text are stylistically relevant (2.2). The arguments put forth to support the thesis that the language of the text is Croatian Church Slavonic are unacceptable, since the law of open syllables did not hold in the time of the Baska tablet (which uses traditional Glagolitic orthography), and the writing and pronunciation of the phonemes yat and schwa in the early 12th century cannot be considered criteria for differentiating linguistic layers, since the value of these phonemes overlap in both the Old Croatian and Croatian Church Slavonic languages. A potential interpretation of Latin influence in the inscription of some names in the text is provided at the end of the work (2.3). A separate chapter (3) consists of a discussion on two processes (Croatisation and Church-Slavonicisation) and concludes, considering that the text of the Baska tablet was composed as a legal text with specific literary characteristics, that the language used on the Baska tablet is a Church-Slavonicised vernacular, although a classification of linguistic data can only say with certainty that it is a Church Slavonic-Cakavian written hybrid.