Tomelleri, Vittorio Springfield and Kempgen, Sebastian (eds) Slavic Alphabets in Contact (review)

Abstract

Slavonic and East European Review, 95, 2, 2017 Reviews Tomelleri, Vittorio Springfield and Kempgen, Sebastian (eds). Slavic Alphabets in Contact. Bamberger Beiträger zur Linguistik, 7. University of Bamberg Press, Bamberg, 2015. xv + 305 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Figures. Tables. Bibliographies. Notes. €20.00 (paperback). This collection of articles arose from a panel devoted to Slavic alphabets in contact situations at the 11th Meeting of German Slavicists, held in October 2012 at the Dresden University of Technology. Subsequently, the organizers invited other colleagues to contribute to the volume which here consists of twelve articles written in German, English, French, Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian. With the number of topics covered being exceptionally broad and important for furthering our knowledge about orthographic systems in general, the articles deal with both the contemporary and historical vicissitudes of Slavic alphabets used across continental Europe and on its periphery. Daniel Bunčić, who had been one of the organizers of the aforementioned panel, could not contribute to the volume due to academic obligations and his work on a project elaborating on the sociolinguistic typology of biscriptality (Winter Verlag, 2016). By outlining different aspects of contact situations for Slavic alphabets in their introduction, the editors remind us, and rightly so, that we still tend to consider Cyrillic as intrinsically a product of Slavic heritage, while the Latin script does not enjoy the status of a native Slavic system (p. viii). Taking this remark as a guideline, Vladimir Alpatov examines the vagaries of the creation of new Latin-based scripts in the 1920s–30s for most of the minority languages spoken in the Soviet Union (pp. 1–11). He focuses on the 1930 experiment of introducing a Latin-based writing system for Russian by a group of linguists headed by Nikolai Iakovlev, which was ultimately rejected due to changes in the political and ideological situation in the country and abroad. Today, the author surmises, the introduction of Latin script in Russia is totally impossible because of ‘the century-old habits and traditions of many million speakers of Russian’, although Iakovlev’s forgotten script still can be employed as an auxiliary (p. 10). Another fragment of Soviet language building in the 1920s–30s is presented by Elena Simonato, who addresses the creation of a Latin-based script by Dmitrii Bubrikh for Karelian (pp. 13–32). According to the author, claiming today that the choice of either Cyrillic or Latin-based script for a minority language in Soviet times was not ideological but contingent, is open to doubt. For instance, working on a script for Karelian, Bubrikh deemed it necessary to determine whether Karelian was a dialect of Finnish or a separate language. Also, since Karelian was spoken in Karelia itself and in the Tver´ region, Bubrikh had to decide which of the two languages required an orthographic system (p. 20). SEER, 95, 2, APRIL 2017 342 Sebastian Kempgen offers an overview of recent changes in Cyrillic as employed in public spheres in Bulgaria, Macedonia and Russia (pp. 33–58). Being descriptive, even ‘graphic’ at its core, with twenty-four colourful illustrations, his study is primarily concerned with ‘visual’ transformations in the ‘script morphology’, encompassing changes in letter shapes and even the use of Latin characters instead of Cyrillic ones (pp. 42–45). However, the author’s conclusion that these changes were engendered earlier in the periphery (Bulgaria and Macedonia) (p. 47) lacks grounding; his research does not furnish any data on the eventual changes that took place in the ‘script morphology’ of Ukrainian and Belarusian. The next article, by Bernhard Brehmer, looks into script-switching as practised by Slavic-German bilinguals participating in multilingual discussion groups in the social network studivz (pp. 59–94). Having researched postings generated by Bulgarians, Russians and Ukrainians living in the German-speaking milieu, the author draws a rather obvious conclusion that Cyrillic is used to signal their ‘linguistic-cultural belonging’ to the Slavic community (p. 88). Elena Surkova’s study focuses on the history of orthographic systems as used in the Belarusian lands from the inception of literacy among the East Slavs to the publication of the Belarusian grammar by Bronislav Tarashkevich in 1918 (pp. 95–130). Offering a sweeping survey of the...