The Elbasan script is a mid 18th-century alphabetic script created for the
Albanian language
Albanian ( endonym: or ) is an Indo-European language and an independent branch of that family of languages. It is spoken by the Albanians in the Balkans and by the Albanian diaspora, which is generally concentrated in the Americas, Europ ...
''
Elbasan Gospel Manuscript
The Elbasan Gospel Manuscript is an 18th-century collection of translations from the New Testament into Albanian. Although the author is mainly known as the Anonymous of Elbasan ( sq, Anonimi i Elbasanit), according to Mahir Domi and Robert Elsie ...
'',
also known as the ''Anonimi i Elbasanit'' ("the Anonymous of Elbasan"), which is the only document written in it.
The document was created at
St. Jovan Vladimir's Church
Saint Gjon Vladimir's Church ( sq, Kisha e Shën Gjon Vladimirit) is a church in Shijon, Elbasan County, Albania. It is dedicated to the Dukljan prince and saint Jovan Vladimir, the son-in-law of the Bulgarian Tsar Samuil. It became a Cultural Mo ...
in central Albania, but is preserved today at the
National Archives of Albania
The General Directorate of Archives ( sq, Drejtoria e Përgjithshme e Arkivave) is the national archive of the Republic of Albania, located in Tirana. Under the former control of the Party of Labour of Albania, the directorate houses the papers o ...
in
Tirana
Tirana ( , ; aln, Tirona) is the capital and largest city of Albania. It is located in the centre of the country, enclosed by mountains and hills with Dajti rising to the east and a slight valley to the northwest overlooking the Adriatic Sea ...
. The script, like the manuscript, is named after the city of
Elbasan
Elbasan ( ; sq-definite, Elbasani ) is the fourth most populous city of Albania and seat of Elbasan County and Elbasan Municipality. It lies to the north of the river Shkumbin between the Skanderbeg Mountains and the Myzeqe Plain in central Al ...
, where it was invented, and although the manuscript isn't the oldest document written in Albanian, the script is the oldest out of seven
[ known original scripts created for Albanian.] Its 59 pages contain Biblical content written in a script of 40 letters, of which 35 frequently recur and 5 are rare.
Letters
Unicode
The Elbasan script (U+10500–U+1052F) was added to the Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...
Standard in June 2014 with the release of version 7.0.
Creation
The Elbasan Gospel Manuscript
The Elbasan Gospel Manuscript comes from the Orthodox Christian
Orthodoxy (from Greek: ) is adherence to correct or accepted creeds, especially in religion.
Orthodoxy within Christianity refers to acceptance of the doctrines defined by various creeds and ecumenical councils in Antiquity, but different Churche ...
monastery of St. Jovan Vladimir's Church in the village of Shijon
Bradashesh is a village and a former municipality in the Elbasan County, central Albania. At the 2015 local government reform it became a subdivision of the municipality Elbasan. The population at the 2011 census was 10,700. The municipal unit cons ...
, west of Elbasan.[ With the exception of a short 15th century Easter Gospel transcript, it was the oldest work of Albanian Orthodox literature, and the oldest Orthodox Bible translation into Albanian.] The authorship of the document is a matter of speculation, see the main article on this topic for details.
The manuscript was purchased a little before or around World War II by the politician Lef Nosi
Lef Nosi (born Elefter Nosi; 9 April 187720 February 1946) was an Albanian publisher, archivist, philologist, folklorist, ethnographer, numismatist, archaeologist and politician. On 28 November 1912, he was as one of the signatories of the Decla ...
, who possessed a remarkable personal library and was a notable collector. It was confiscated from him by the communist
Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, a s ...
regime in 1945. It is now preserved in the National Archives of Albania
The General Directorate of Archives ( sq, Drejtoria e Përgjithshme e Arkivave) is the national archive of the Republic of Albania, located in Tirana. Under the former control of the Party of Labour of Albania, the directorate houses the papers o ...
. The albanologist and translator Injac Zamputi
Injac Zamputi ( it, Ignazio Zamputti; Shkodra, 12 February 1910 – 28 February 1998) was an Albanian scholar, writer, and historian.
Early life
Zamputi was born on 12 February 1910 in Shkodra, today's Albania, back then still part of the Vilaye ...
(1910–1998) transcribed the manuscript, after which the Elbasan Gospel was published in standard Albanian for the first time.
Anonymous authorship
The author of the script remains unknown, though several hypothesis have been brough forward. The most accepted proposal comes from Mahir Domi in 1965, claiming the Moschopole typographer Gregory of Durrës
Gregory of Durrës ( sq, Gregori i Durrësit; el, Γρηγόριος ο Δυρραχίου, Grêgorios ho Dyrrakhíu; la, Gregorius Dyrrhachii; Gregory of Dyrrachium)Grigori is also recorded as Grigori Voskopojari ( Eng: Gregory of Voskopoja) ( ...
to be the author of the script. Domi bases his claim on several factors, the main one being a note by (1744–1804) that states "Gregory of Durrës translated the Old and New Testament on a script he invented himself". Domi's hypothesis was later supported by Robert Elsie.
The name "Papa Totasi" (father Totasi) is written on the cover's verso
' is the "right" or "front" side and ''verso'' is the "left" or "back" side when text is written or printed on a leaf of paper () in a bound item such as a codex, book, broadsheet, or pamphlet.
Etymology
The terms are shortened from Latin ...
, thus sometimes the script is attributed to him.
Historical analysis
Robert Elsie
Robert Elsie (June 29, 1950 – October 2, 2017) was a Canadian-born German scholar who specialized in Albanian literature and folklore.
Elsie was a writer, translator, interpreter, and specialist in Albanian studies, being the author of numerou ...
notes the author's desire to avoid foreign influences. The Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
, Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
and Arabic script
The Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used writing system in the world by number of countries using it or a script directly derived from it, and the ...
s had already been in use for Albanian, and the Cyrillic
, bg, кирилица , mk, кирилица , russian: кириллица , sr, ћирилица, uk, кирилиця
, fam1 = Egyptian hieroglyphs
, fam2 = Proto-Sinaitic
, fam3 = Phoenician
, fam4 = G ...
and Glagolitic
The Glagolitic script (, , ''glagolitsa'') is the oldest known Slavic alphabet. It is generally agreed to have been created in the 9th century by Saint Cyril, a monk from Thessalonica. He and his brother Saint Methodius were sent by the Byzan ...
scripts were also available. But the author chose to devise a new script specific to Albanian, reflecting what Elsie called "the wish of Albanian intellectuals" for a distinct writing system of their own. Furthermore, a surprisingly low number of loanwords appear in the manuscript: only three Latin loans, seven Turkish loans, and twenty-one loans from Biblical Greek
Koine Greek (; Koine el, ἡ κοινὴ διάλεκτος, hē koinè diálektos, the common dialect; ), also known as Hellenistic Greek, common Attic, the Alexandrian dialect, Biblical Greek or New Testament Greek, was the common supra-reg ...
(the language the manuscript was translated from).[ Elsie argues that the author's determination to root out loanwords becomes clear with the marked crossing out of the Turkish loan ''sheher'' and its replacement with the native term ''qytet''.][
]
Properties
The Elbasan script exhibited a nearly one-to-one correspondence
In mathematics, a bijection, also known as a bijective function, one-to-one correspondence, or invertible function, is a function between the elements of two sets, where each element of one set is paired with exactly one element of the other s ...
between sounds and letters, with only three exceptions, of which two were restricted to Greek loanwords. The modern Albanian alphabet
The Albanian alphabet ( sq, alfabeti shqip) is a variant of the Latin alphabet used to write the Albanian language. It consists of 36 letters:
''Note:'' The vowels are shown in bold.
The letters are named simply by their sounds, followed by ë ...
, written in the Latin script, is phonemically regular for the standard pronunciation but it is not one-to-one because of the use of ten consonant digraphs.
Dots are used on three characters as inherent features to indicate varied pronunciation found in Albanian: single r represents the alveolar tap Alveolus (; pl. alveoli, adj. alveolar) is a general anatomical term for a concave cavity or pit.
Uses in anatomy and zoology
* Pulmonary alveolus, an air sac in the lungs
** Alveolar cell or pneumocyte
** Alveolar duct
** Alveolar macrophage
* M ...
but with a dot it becomes an alveolar trill
The voiced alveolar trill is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents dental, alveolar, and postalveolar trills is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is r. ...
, whereas a dotted l becomes velarized
Velarization is a secondary articulation of consonants by which the back of the tongue is raised toward the velum during the articulation of the consonant.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, velarization is transcribed by one of four d ...
and a dotted d becomes prenasalized
Prenasalized consonants are phonetic sequences of a nasal and an obstruent (or occasionally a non-nasal sonorant such as ) that behave phonologically like single consonants. The primary reason for considering them to be single consonants, rather ...
into ''nd''. (Today this ''nd'' has become a sequence of two separate phonemes; Modern Greek has undergone somewhat similar development.) Elsie says that the script generally uses Greek letters with a line on top as numerals. While some of the letters appear to have been inspired by Greek or Glagolitic forms, he considers the majority to be unique for this script, whereas Shuteriqi and Domi[Domi, Mahir (1965). ''Rreth autorit dhe kohës së dorëshkrimit elbasanas me shqipërim copash të ungjillit''. In the First Conference of Albanologic Studies: Tiranë, 1965. Pages 270-277] see a strong influence of Old Church Slavonic language
Old Church Slavonic or Old Slavonic () was the first Slavic literary language.
Historians credit the 9th-century Byzantine missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius with standardizing the language and using it in translating the Bible and other ...
due to the jurisdiction, until 1767, of the Archbishopric of Ohrid
The Archbishopric of Ohrid, also known as the Bulgarian Archbishopric of Ohrid
*T. Kamusella in The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe, Springer, 2008, p. 276
*Aisling Lyon, Decentralisation and the Management of Ethni ...
.
See also
*Todhri script
The Todhri script is an 18th-century Albanian alphabetical writing system invented for writing the Albanian language by Theodhor Haxhifilipi, also known as Dhaskal Todhri.
History
It is a complex writing system of fifty-two characters which was ...
*Linguistic purism
Linguistic purism or linguistic protectionism is the prescriptive practice of defining or recognizing one variety of a language as being purer or of intrinsically higher quality than other varieties. Linguistic purism was institutionalized th ...
*Albanian alphabet
The Albanian alphabet ( sq, alfabeti shqip) is a variant of the Latin alphabet used to write the Albanian language. It consists of 36 letters:
''Note:'' The vowels are shown in bold.
The letters are named simply by their sounds, followed by ë ...
*Vithkuqi script
Vithkuqi script, also called Büthakukye or Beitha Kukju after the appellation applied to it by German Albanologist Johann Georg von Hahn, was an alphabetic script invented for writing the Albanian language between 1825 and 1845 by Albanian sch ...
Sources
*
*
*
*
External links
Free Elbasan Unicode font
Google font Noto Sans for Elbasan
* ttps://elbasanscri.pt/ Elbasan Script Transliterator
{{list of writing systems
Albanian scripts
Alphabets
Obsolete writing systems
Constructed scripts