Elbasan Alphabet

The Elbasan alphabet is a mid 18th-century alphabetic script created for the Albanian language '' Elbasan Gospel Manuscript'', also known as the ''Anonimi i Elbasanit'' ("the Anonymous of Elbasan"), which is the only document written in it. The document was created at St. Jovan Vladimir's Church in central Albania, but is preserved today at the National Archives of Albania in Tirana. The alphabet, like the manuscript, is named after the city of Elbasan, where it was invented, and although the manuscript isn't the oldest document written in Albanian, Elbasan is the oldest out of seven known original alphabets created for Albanian. Its 59 pages contain Biblical content written in a script of 40 letters, of which 35 frequently re-occur and 5 are rare.

Letters

Sample, from page 8, lines 10–14 of the manuscript:

Creation

The Elbasan Gospel Manuscript

The Elbasan Gospel Manuscript comes from the Orthodox Christian monastery of St. Jovan Vladimir's Church in the village of Shijon, west of Elbasan. With the exception of a short 15th century Easter Gospel transcript, it was the oldest work of Albanian Orthodox literature, and the oldest Orthodox Bible translation into Albanian. The authorship of the document is a matter of speculation, see the main article on this topic for details.

The manuscript was purchased a little before or around World War II by the politician Lef Nosi, who possessed a remarkable personal library and was a notable collector. It was confiscated from him by the communist regime in 1945. It is now preserved in the National Archives of Albania. The albanologist and translator Injac Zamputi (1910–1998) transcribed the manuscript, after which the Elbasan Gospel was published in standard Albanian for the first time.

Authorship

The author of the alphabet remains unknown, though several hypotheses have been brought forward. The most accepted proposal comes from Mahir Domi in 1965, claiming the Moschopole typographer Gregory of Durrës to be the author of the alphabet. Domi bases his claim on several factors, the main one being a note by (1744–1804) which states "Gregory of Durrës translated the Old and New Testament on a script he invented himself". Domi's hypothesis was later supported by Robert Elsie.

The name "Papa Totasi" (father Totasi) is written on the cover's verso, thus sometimes the alphabet is attributed to him. Recent studies seem to point out a certain Cosmas of Durrës (1643-1702) as the author of at least the alphabet, if not the text itself.

Historical analysis

Robert Elsie notes the author's desire to avoid foreign influences. The Latin, Greek and Arabic scripts had already been in use for Albanian, and the Cyrillic and Glagolitic scripts were also available. But the author chose to devise a new script specific to Albanian, reflecting what Elsie called "the wish of Albanian intellectuals" for a distinct writing system of their own. Furthermore, a surprisingly low number of loanwords appear in the manuscript: only three Latin loans, seven Turkish loans, and twenty-one loans from Biblical Greek (the language the manuscript was translated from). Elsie argues that the author's determination to root out loanwords becomes clear with the marked crossing out of the Turkish loan ''sheher'' "city" and its replacement with ''qytet'', which was apparently not recognized as a loan from Latin ''cīvitāt(em)''.

Properties

The Elbasan alphabet exhibited a nearly one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters, with only three exceptions, of which two were restricted to Greek loanwords. The modern Albanian alphabet, based on the Latin script, is phonemically regular for the standard pronunciation but it is not one-to-one because of the use of ten consonant digraphs.

Dots are used on three characters as inherent features to indicate varied pronunciation found in Albanian: single r represents the alveolar tap but with a dot it becomes an alveolar trill , whereas a dotted l becomes velarized and a dotted d becomes prenasalized into ''nd''. (Today this ''nd'' has become a sequence of two separate phonemes; Modern Greek has undergone somewhat similar development.) Elsie says that the alphabet generally uses Greek letters with a line on top as numerals. While some of the letters appear to have been inspired by Greek or Glagolitic forms, he considers the majority to be unique for this alphabet, whereas Shuteriqi and DomiDomi, Mahir (1965). ''Rreth autorit dhe kohës së dorëshkrimit elbasanas me shqipërim copash të ungjillit''. In the First Conference of Albanologic Studies: Tiranë, 1965. Pages 270-277 see a strong influence of Old Church Slavonic language due to the jurisdiction, until 1767, of the Archbishopric of Ohrid.

Unicode

Elbasan (U+10500–U+1052F) was added to the Unicode Standard in June 2014 with the release of version 7.0.

See also

*Albanian alphabet
*Linguistic purism
* Todhri alphabet
* Vithkuqi alphabet

Sources

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External links

Free Elbasan Unicode font

Google font Noto Sans for Elbasan


- Omniglot

Elbasan Script Transliterator

{{list of writing systems

Albanian scripts
Alphabets
Albanian inventions
Obsolete writing systems
Constructed scripts