Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I received an email from a Scandinavian of long standing who sent me and Hatty this on a subject not without interest. (To President Putin as well.)
| What's the oldest text in a Slavic language? by Geograf |
I'm a busy man so I contented myself with brief interpolations to the first para and sent it back.
| The oldest surviving Slavic text [a 'world record'] is the Codex Suprasliensis, which is now in National University Library [red flag, not so much 'National' as 'nationalist'] of Ljubljana [Slovenia]. It was found in Poland [Poland] and created in what is now Bulgaria [Bulgaria] in the mid [red flag, exact but not dated]-10th century. It is written in Cyrillic in Old Church Slavonic [Russian]. How exactly it came to Poland is unknown [red flag, it is kinda important since it's virtually the whole of its provenance] we only know that Canon Michał Bobrowski [a priest and a palaeographer] found it [when? careful ignoral] in the Orthodox monastery of Supraśl [in Catholic Poland though part of Orthodox Russia at the time]. Then the same man [red flag, it's unusual to find a national treasure then promptly send it abroad] sent it to Slovenia to Jernej Kopitar, who never returned it because he died [it was the shock] before then [red flag, how convenient of him]. |
Someone had commented in the original
| “In what is now Bulgaria” it was Bulgaria back then too bud, not Mars or something Billie J |
Which I'll have to remember. The original poster later said
| I apologize, I made a mistake, the oldest text in one of the Slavic languages is a poem called Proglas written by Saint Cyril in the Glagolitic script that he invented. It was written in Old Church Slavonic in the middle of the 9th century. The text was published in Prague |
It's hard enough coming up with a poem without having to come up with an alphabet to write it in. Be that as it may, Hatty had the last word
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The codex’s provenance is 1823
| Wiki wrote: | | The 284-folio (or 285-folio, according to some sources) codex was "discovered" in 1823 by Canon Michał Bobrowski in the Uniate Basilian monastery in Supraśl. |
The quotation marks around ‘discovered’ are Wiki’s, not mine, though I’d have put them in if they weren’t there.
| In 1838, Bobrowski sent the last part of the manuscript in two pieces to Slovene philologist Jernej Kopitar so that he could transcribe it. After Kopitar returned it, Bobrowski sent him the first part (118 folios), however for unknown reasons it was never returned to Bobrowski and was found in 1845 among the documents of the deceased Kopitar. It was later kept by the Ljubljana Lyceum and now by the National and University Library of Slovenia in Ljubljana. |
Fifteen years sounds just about enough time to produce a couple of hundred pages of text. It seems to have been twenty or more years before the first part was located (in 1845 we’re told) which makes me wonder if Kopitar, the Slovenian transcriber, had been commissioned to write it. 'Transcribe' is one of those somewhat ambiguous, vaguely technical terms that seem to have several meanings (along with 'redact')
| The largest part was bought for the private library of the Zamoyski family in Warsaw. This part of the codex disappeared during World War II, but later resurfaced in the United States and was returned by Herbert Moeller to Poland in 1968, where it has been held by the National Library of Poland in Warsaw until the present day. The third part, consisting of 16 folios, is held by the Russian National Library in Saint Petersburg. |
This is so familiar, it’s almost a trope. (Emphases are mine this time). The participation of the St Petersburg RNL is not entirely unexpected.
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A Hermitage suspect package, 'not entirely unexpected'? A master of understatement, our Hatty.
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