Retro-digitization and Interpretation of Croatian Grammar Books before Illyrism - The State of the Art

Retro-digitization of Croatian linguistic heritage is an important and comprehensive component of Digital Humanities network in Croatia, as an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of the computing or digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. Despite that, the creation of retro-digitized resources in Croatia is still in its beginnings and the existing resources do not include grammars from the pre-standard period of the Croatian language. Therefore, there is no repository that would contain a digitized and searchable database of Croatian language grammar books of the period, no model that could be applied and no systematically conducted scholarly research in the field. The aim of the project Retro-digitization and Interpretation of Croatian Grammar Books before Illyrism to change this situation.

This innovative (in the context of the European and Croatian philology) and comprehensive approach of presenting eight historical grammars implies the transfer of the printed media to computer-readable and searchable text. In this project, it also includes multilevel mark-up of the transcribed or translated grammar text and its connection with facsimiles. Digitization process will include the mark-up of the grammar text segments and morphological paradigms by TEI tags and will be conducted on transcriptions or translations of the selected grammars. The way of grammar editing depends on the particularities of each grammar, as not all grammars are written in Croatian, nor all grammars describe the Croatian language.

The main aim of the project is to create a web portal of the Croatian grammar books before Illyrism (before the choice of the common standard language and orthography), which would include facsimiles of selected grammar books with basic information, transcription or translation and an index of historical grammar and linguistic terminology. The portal will be equipped by thematic searching possibilities on the morphology level.

This innovative and digital approach of presenting old texts (which are not always easily accessible) fundamentally changes the perspective and practicalities of conducting research on the historical material. Digital facsimiles will enable research on the material which was not presented before (some grammars are still in manuscripts) and the individual mark-up of the morphological paradigms will enable comparison between the selected grammars.

The main objective of the project is to intensify research activities and the interpretation of the Croatian pre-standard grammars within the scope of modern linguistic disciplines (e.g. cognitive approach), to complete existing knowledge about the morphological development of the Croatian language, its normative descriptions and the development of linguistic terminology in the pre-standard period.

The web portal of early Croatian grammars will be open for the general public and will serve as an example of presenting historical texts of any kind and as a starting point of similar research in the different fields of humanities, and particularly historical linguistics. This kind of digital infrastructure is available for further upgrade and opens the possibility of linking and exchanging knowledge with other institutions.