Multiscripturality in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania : new research approaches

doi:10.1177/0888325418807284

Multiscripturality in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania : new research approaches

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Multiscripturality in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania : new research approaches

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Bibliographic description

title:	Multiscripturality in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania : new research approaches
alternative title:	Wielopiśmienność Wielkiego Księstwa Litewskiego : nowe perspektywy badawcze
author:	Niedźwiedź Jakub
translator:	Frick David
journal title:	East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
volume:	33
issue:	1
date of publication :	2019
pages:	3-16
ISSN:	0888-3254
eISSN:	1533-8371
DOI:	10.1177/0888325418807284
URL:	https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0888325418807284
date accessed:	2019-04-09
language:	English
journal language:	English
abstract in English:	The paper deals with the problem of using different languages of writing in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. Among them there were: Latin, Polish, Ruthenian, Church Slavonic, Lithuanian, German, Yiddish, Hebrew, Arabic and Greek, written in five alphabets: Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic and Greek. The author noticed that this multi-lingualism and multi-alphabeticism was omitted in Polish studies about the history of literature of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He argues that including these two issues in the studies on the Commonwealth’s history is crucial to better understand the multi-cultural and multi-ethnic character of this country. One of the main questions of the paper is about the relationship between a script and identity. The author notices that a comparative approach can be especially productive in such research. He examines similar borderland processes in use of writing in medieval and early modern England, Sicily, Malta, Cyprus, Venice, Dubrovnik, Moldova and Andalusia. It is illustrated by a few cases of use of the Cyrillic, Latin and Arabic alphabets. The author draws a comparison between the sixteenth-century literary languages of Spanish Moriscos and Lithuanian Tatars. Both these languages were based on the written version of a vernacular language (Romance and Byelorussian) in the Arabic alphabet.
keywords in English:	culture of the borderlands, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, history of reading and writing, early modern literature, old Polish literature, old Byelorussian literature, early modern muslim literature in Lithuania
number of pulisher's sheets:	0,8
affiliation:	Wydział Polonistyki : Katedra Historii Literatury Staropolskiej
type:	journal article
subtype:	translation