Vatican Croatian Prayer Book
Encyclopedia
Shtokavian dialect
Shtokavian or Štokavian is the prestige dialect of the Serbo-Croatian language, and the basis of its Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Montenegrin standards...
vernacular literary
Vernacular literature
Vernacular literature is literature written in the vernacular—the speech of the "common people".In the European tradition, this effectively means literature not written in Latin...
idiom.
Written between 1380 and 1400 in Dubrovnik
Dubrovnik
Dubrovnik is a Croatian city on the Adriatic Sea coast, positioned at the terminal end of the Isthmus of Dubrovnik. It is one of the most prominent tourist destinations on the Adriatic, a seaport and the centre of Dubrovnik-Neretva county. Its total population is 42,641...
as a transcript and transliteration from older texts composed in a mixture of Church Slavonic and čakavian
Chakavian dialect
Chakavian or Čakavian is a dialect of the Croatian language. The name stems from the word for "what?", which is "ča" in Čakavian...
idioms and written down in Glagolitic and Bosnian Cyrillic
Bosnian Cyrillic
Bosnian Cyrillic or Croatian Cyrillic, widely known as Bosančica, is an extinct Cyrillic script, that originated in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was widely used in Bosnia and Croatia . Its name in Bosnian and Croatian is bosančica or bosanica, which can literally be translated as Bosnian script...
scripts, it retained a few phonological and morphological features found in the original manuscript
Manuscript
A manuscript or handwrite is written information that has been manually created by someone or some people, such as a hand-written letter, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way...
s. The book contains the following parts: Offices of the Virgin Mary according to the rites of the Roman Church; seven penitentiary psalms; Offices of the Holy Cross; Offices for the dead; Offices of the Holy Spirit as well as numerous prayers. The script is the Roman Gothic, embroidered with luxuriantly outlined initials and miniatures. The name of the prayer book reflects the fact that it is held in the Vatican library. The text has become widely known from 1859, when influential Croatian historian Franjo Rački drew attention to it, but the first critical edition did not appear until the 20th century: Croatian literary historian and philologist Franjo Fancev published «Vatican Croatian prayer book» in 1934.
The book's central importance lies in the fact that it is the first major štokavian
Shtokavian dialect
Shtokavian or Štokavian is the prestige dialect of the Serbo-Croatian language, and the basis of its Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Montenegrin standards...
vernacular text. Although proto-štokavian and mixed Church Slavonic-štokavian manuscripts are known to have appeared a century or two before the «Vatican Croatian prayer book», this is the first text in what can be termed a vernacular-lingua vulgaris. Analyses of the manuscript have shown that recorded morphological and phonological features are transient forms in the development of the shtokavian dialect
Shtokavian dialect
Shtokavian or Štokavian is the prestige dialect of the Serbo-Croatian language, and the basis of its Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Montenegrin standards...
, while its syntax is pretty much archaic- especially when compared to the idiom of later prayer books (the Croatian prayer book from 1450s, also from Dubrovnik and held in the library of Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Zagreb), or the syntax of Držić's
Marin Držic
Marin Držić is considered the finest Croatian Renaissance playwright and prose writer.- Life :Born into a large and well to do family in Dubrovnik, Držić was trained and ordained as a priest — a calling very unsuitable for his rebel temperament...
dramas (early 16th century), which is essentially the same as the syntactical structure of modern standard Croatian
Croatian language
Croatian is the collective name for the standard language and dialects spoken by Croats, principally in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Serbian province of Vojvodina and other neighbouring countries...
.