Bosnian Cyrillic - Controversies and Polemic

Controversies and Polemic

The polemic about "ethnic affiliation" of Bosnian Cyrillic started in 1850s and is not settled yet. Without going into nuances and details, the polemic about attribution and affiliation of Bosnian Cyrillic texts seems to rest on further arguments:

• Serbian scholars claim that it is just a variant of Serbian Cyrillic; actually, a minuscle, or Italic script devised at the court of Serbian king Dragutin. This general claim ranges from the contention that other nations had been using a form of Serbian script to the idea that all who wrote in Bosnian Cyrillic were ethnically Serb. According to them, all Bosnian Cyrillic texts belong to the corpus of Serbian literacy. Some consider that a strong argument in favour of the Serb side is the fact that there are a lot of mentions of Bosnian Cyrillic as 'Serbian letters' or 'Serbian characters' among Catholics (in Bosnia and Dubrovnik) and Muslims. The main Serbian authorities in the field are Jorjo Tadić, Vladimir Ćorović, Petar Kolendić, Petar Đorđić, Vera Jerković, Irena Grickat, Pavle Ivić and Aleksandar Mladenović.

• The Croatian side is split. One school of paleography basically challenges the letters being Serbian. It claims that majority of the most important documents of Bosnian Cyrillic had been written either before any innovations devised at the Serbian royal court happened, or did not have any historical connection with it whatsoever- the Serbian claims on the origin of Bosnian Cyrillic are unfounded, and the script, since belonging to the Croatian cultural sphere should be called not Bosnian, but Croatian Cyrillic. Another school of Croatian philologists acknowledges that "Serbian connection", as exemplified in variants present at the Serbian court of king Dragutin, did influence Bosnian Cyrillic- but, they aver, it was just one strand, since scriptory innovations have been happening both before and after the mentioned one. First school insists that all Bosnian Cyrillic texts belong to the corpus of Croatian literacy, and the second school that all texts from Croatia and only a part from Bosnia and Herzegovina are to be placed into Croatian literary canon (they exclude ca. half of Bosnian Christian texts, but include all Franciscan and the majority of legal and commercial documents). Also, the second school generally uses the name Western Cyrillic instead of Croatian Cyrillic (or Bosnian Cyrillic, for that matter). Both schools mention that various sources, both Croatian and other European (German, Italian,..) call this script "Croatian letters" or "Croatian script". The main Croatian authorities in the field are Vatroslav Jagić, Mate Tentor, Ćiro Truhelka, Vladimir Vrana, Jaroslav Šidak, Herta Kuna, Tomislav Raukar, Eduard Hercigonja and Benedikta Zelić-Bučan.

• Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) scholars have always considered that the Bosnian Cyrillic is neither Croat nor Serb, but ethnically Bosnian and, subsequently, Bosniak, as the supposed ethnic successors of medieval Bosnia and the native Bosnian Church.

The irony of the contemporary status of Bosnian Cyrillic is as follows: scholars are still trying to prove that Bosnian Cyrillic is ethnically their own, while simultaneously relegating the corpus of Bosnian Cyrillic written texts to the periphery of national culture. This extinct form of Cyrillic is peripheral to Croatian paleography which focuses on Glagolitic and Latin script corpora while Bosniaks, although acknowledging Bosnian Cyrillic heritage, have been focusing efforts on investigating Bosnian vernacular literature in a modified Arabic script. The heated dispute on the nature and status of Bosnian Cyrillic is probably destined to remain confined to specialist academic circles.