ISSN: 2534-5192 (electronic) – 2681-8566 (print)

ISBN: 978-2-487055-04-9 e-ISBN: 978-2-487055-05-6 Download (NOT THERE YET)

Reinterpreting the Semiotics of Glagolitic Katharina Tyran  Download (339.65 kB) Abstract. In my contribution I am addressing current usage of an archaic Slavic writing system, Glagolitic, in Croatia. Created in the 9{th} century in the course of Slavic Christianization, glagoljica gained traction in mediaeval Croatian territories early on, followed by further independent developments. Although the script historically never gained the status of a persistently widely used system for writing and reading in Croatia, and today apart from small academic circles, hardly anyone can actually read and write it, it is celebrated as a very specific visual sign for national culture. Croatian society however uses the Glagolitic script not for ‘representing’ the language or the spoken word respectively itself, but rather for expressing and marking a specific cultural and ethnic sense of belonging, which I will exemplify by a case example from soccer. Glagoljica, I argue, has recently undergone a reinterpretation of its semiotic means. Despite a lack of current referential function as a system for writing and reading, Glagolitic has been conventionalized as an autochthonous national heritage, as a specific sign of Croatian cultural, and thus also national identity. I therefore propose that Glagolitic as a writing system in toto may be grasped as a ‘sign’ and not so much as a system or set of constituent signs, e.g., graphemes, and that it became as such part of a Croatian ‘national knowledge’. DOI: https://doi.org/10.36824/2022-graf-tyra How to cite How to cite in BIB Katharina Tyran (2022), “Reinterpreting the Semiotics of Glagolitic,” in Proceedings of Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century, 2022 (Yannis Haralambous, Ed.), Grapholinguistics and Its Applications, Vol. 9, Brest: Fluxus Editions, 253–264. @INPROCEEDINGS{gla9-tyra, AUTHOR = {Katharina Tyran}, EDITOR = {Haralambous, Yannis}, TITLE = {{Reinterpreting the Semiotics of Glagolitic}}, BOOKTITLE = {{Proceedings of Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century, 2022}}, SERIES = {{Grapholinguistics and Its Applications}}, VOLUME = {9}, PUBLISHER = {Fluxus Editions}, ADDRESS = {Brest}, YEAR = {2022}, PAGES = {253--264}, DOI = {https://doi.org/10.36824/2022-graf-tyra}, }