Column - Nemanja D. Milinović
Culture of Malleus
Last couple of months, I have followed the agony about bilingual boards in the Republic of Croatia. I write about this topic, not only because I am attracted by linguistics,
or because of the fact I lived abroad and saw the other cultural patterns, but because
I believe that this type of cultural issue is a moral responsibility of every man.
T
he first news about this topic appeared yet in
February. Vukovar was back then covered with
anticyrilic posters. The petition against public usage of the Cyrilc alphabet had been signed for days.
The agony continued during the September when
the first bilingual posters were taken off, and initiated placing of boards was cancelled. Last couple of
weeks, Vukovar was declared a city of a special piety
thus legally finishing with the Cyrilic alphabet.
Just before the beginning of the agony in Croatia,
the Cyrilic was unsuccessfully intruded on the teritory of Novi Sad, where the local authorities tried
to proclaim with an official writing system on the
public places. Finally it was decided that the public
inscriptions in Novi Sad must be written in the minorities’ writing systems. What do we know about
the Cyrilic and what sin did a dead letter commit
to a mankind, so it was being discussed and decided about in this so unenlightened way?!
The Cyrilic is the writing system that has been used
36 | www.bulevarumetnosti.rs
in the several Slovene, East-European and Asian
languages. Certain Altaic and Ugrofinnic languages
use the Cyrilic as well. According to the universally
accepted scientific thesis, the Cyrilic is younger
than the Glagolitic script, that was drafted by Cyril
and Methodius and it came to be in the tenth century. One of the hypothesis was that Clement of Ohrid
contained the Cyrilic and named it after his teacher.
Even though, it can’t be said surely who was the author of Cyrilic, the students of Cyril and Methodius
were believed to have created this unique script by
using the Greek alphabet and Glagolitic. The present day the Cyrilic hasn’t been the same in all languages. It represents the unique language inheritage, so together with the Latin and Greek alphabet it
could be found on the new euro banknotes, which
symbolically pointed at the Cyrilic as a part of the
European cultural identity.
I still don’t understand what the Cyrilic fault is.
Aren’t the language and the script the wealth of
an environment? Aren’t the carrier of Hungarian in