To read what others wrote two thousand years ago and to write so that others can read after a few thousand years is a science that the human mind almost surpasses, and one could say that the one who invented it was more a god than a man, the thought is Vuk Stefanović Karadžić to which it is Milorad Durutović recalled in the opening remarks of the lecture "Letter as the basis of literacy - about the Cyrillic alphabet from Save Mrkalja to Vuk Stefanović Karadžić" which was assisted by Ph.D Jelena Gazdić held on Tuesday evening in the "Radosav Ljumović" National Library in Podgorica.
Durutović also reminded that the International Literacy Day is celebrated on September 8 worldwide, and that this lecture can also be treated as a contribution to that worldwide appeal to affirm literacy.
"And today, as you know, it is at such a high level that this hall is as full as it is. There is no need to further educate ourselves", Durutović added ironically.
Gazdić explains that the beginning of literacy is linked to the brothers Ćiril and Metodij as the Glagolitic script, and that in the close period when the Glagolitic was created, the Old Slavic Cyrillic was also created, the number of letters of which varied from 38 to 43 letters.
"The Cyrillic alphabet of the Serbo-Slavic language, which was separated from the Old Slavic Cyrillic alphabet by a few letters, was created over time from that Old Slavic Cyrillic alphabet. The number of letters in the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet also varied from 38 to 43", she explained and said that the beginning of the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet is related to the letter "đerv".
Gazdić states that until 1810, even in Sava Mrkalj, there were no major reforms of the Cyrillic alphabet, and that everything was very complicated and confused. In agreement with the audience, it was concluded that Sava Mrkalj is not talked about enough, and no one remembers that Sava Mrkalj is actually mentioned in schools.
"It is unfairly neglected in Montenegrin education, but not in linguistics either. But our education system does not see fit to pay more attention to Sava Mrkalje, to see that he is responsible for the fact that today we have one of the simplest letters that people write at all", observes Gazdić.
She recalled his "genius work" that he wrote at the age of 27 "Salo debeloga jera libo azbukoprotres".
"In the 19th century, we had a complicated literary and linguistic situation. We had, conditionally speaking, four literary languages, but they were more four literary-linguistic expressions (Serbo-Slavic, Russo-Slavic, Serbian folk and Slavo-Serbian, which was a mixture of all these). That's why language reform was needed, because it was no longer known how anyone writes," adds Gazdić.
She recalled that Vuk Stefanović Karadžić called that "situation" "the rules of Grandma Smiljana".
"Sava said that the alphabet needed only monophonic letters (monophonic letters), which means what Vuk later adopted: "One letter - one voice". He made the alphabet so that the final list of graphemes was 29, of which 25 are monophonic according to the principle, that is, one letter - one sound, and he had digrams for dž, đ, lj and nj", explains Gazdić.
However, they add during the lecture, his reform was not accepted by the church and he retired and became a monk. However, he didn't manage there either, and there is an anecdote that he lashed out at his drawing teacher who asked him to translate the baptism certificate into Latin, which is why he ended up in prison, they said.
In 1817 Mrkalj wrote another important work "Palinodija libo odbrana debelo jera". Some linguists see that work as his redemption, that is, that he renounced the reform. However, in the second half of the 20th century and in the 21st century, linguists do not agree with this opinion, because it is not explicitly written anywhere in the palinody when we read it, Gazdić points out.
"Sava Mrkalj tragically ended up left alone in poverty in the hospital, first in the Karlovac hospital, and then in the mental hospital in Vienna, where he died in 1833. It is important to note that near the end of his life, he asked Vuk Stefanović Karadžić to send him a book, and in a letter to Vuk he said "of course, Serbian". This can also support the claim that Sava Mrkalj did not deviate from his alphabet, because if in 1833, after all this turbulence, he still wrote to Vuka, and he knew what kind of book he could get from him in that period - certainly not one in Church Slavonic Cyrillic." , claims Gazdić.
She concludes that Sava Mrkalje can be seen as a great reformer of the Serbian alphabet, and Vuk Stefanović Karadžić as a reformer of Serbian orthography.
"There is no need to confront the two of them. What Sava Mrkalj started, Vuk completed with the final decisions in 1818," said Gazdić.
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