History
Čakavian is the oldest written Croatian dialect that had made a visible appearance in legal documents - as early as 1275 ("Istrian land survey") and 1288 ("Vinodol codex"), the predominantly vernacular Čakavian is recorded, mixed with elements of Church Slavic. Archaic Čakavian can be traced back to 1105 in the Baška tablet. All these and other early Čakavian texts up to 17th century are mostly written in Glagolitic alphabet.
Initially, the Čakavian dialect covered a much wider area than today including about 2/3 of medieval Croatia: the major part of central and southern Croatia southwards of Kupa and westwards of Una river, as well as western and southwestern Bosnia and Herzegovina. During and after the Ottoman intrusion and subsequent warfare (15th–18th centuries), the Čakavian area has become greatly reduced and in the Croatian mainlands it has recently been almost entirely replaced by Štokavian, so it is now spoken in a much smaller coastal area than indicated above.
As expected, in over nine centuries Čakavian has undergone many phonetic, morphological and syntactical changes chiefly in turbulent mainlands, and less in isolated islands. Yet, contemporary dialectologists are particularly interested in it since it has retained the old accentuation system characterized by a Proto-Slavic new rising accent and the old position of stress, and also numerous Proto-Slavic and some Proto-Indo-European archaisms in its vocabulary.
Read more about this topic: Chakavian Dialect
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“American time has stretched around the world. It has become the dominant tempo of modern history, especially of the history of Europe.”
—Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978)
“The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more, it is the history of earth and of heaven.”
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)
“Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)