Procsedings of the XVI EURALEX Intemational Congress: The User in Focus

slavic language (i.e. OCS), and willing to embrace literacy in a newly-invented script for its notificati-
on - Glagolitza or the Glagolitic script, created probably by Cyril.

After the end of the mission, a certain number of Cyril and Methodius' disciples arrived in the territo-
1y populated by the Croats. Under the influence of the Croatian vernacular, a new Church Slavonic
language system came to be. That literary, bookish idiom used in Croatia from the XI/XII until the
XVII c.is known as the Croatian Church Slavonic.It had a privileged status throughout the Croatian
 Middle Ages within the Croatian diasystem,' characterized by the Croatian/CCS diglossia?,as it was a
liturgical language, whose usage regularly marked a high literary style.

'Two things should be mentioned in order to signal the importance of CCS.The first one considers Eu-
ropean culture and history,and the even broader context of the Catholic Church history.CCS was the
only close-vernacular idiom which gained and retained the explicit permission of the Pope to be used
for liturgical purposes (besides Latin, Greek and Hebrew).Therefore, ahead of the decision of the Se-
cond Vatican Council allowing Catholic liturgy in vernacular,a CCS mass was served in the Roman st.
Peter's basilica.The second thing to mention considers Croatian literacy.Namely, CCS is the first Cro-
atian literary language, used from the end of XI c. until 1561. Its significance is reflected in the fact
that it is the language of the Baška tablet (Cro. Bašćanska ploča, dated in 1100), one of the first and
most important Croatian written monuments, but also the language of the first Croatian incunabula,
 Missale Romanum Glagolitice, which is the first missal in Europe not published in the Latin script and
Latin language.Six out of nine Croatian incunabula were printed in CCS.The preserved Croatian texts

in the Cyrillic script date from later periods, as is the case with the texts in Latin script.

2  The Corpus of the Croatian Church Slavonic texts (abbr. the
CCS Corpus)

2.1 Basic Information on the Corpus of the Croatian Church Slavonic texts
(abbr. the CCS Corpus)

Here, the term “corpus" is understood as a language material, a cluster of texts, purposefully collected
to testify choices and combinations of choices made by users of a particular language (sinclair

2003:

 

$.Svensćn 2009: 43).The CCS corpus is primarily prepared for the compiling of the Dictionary
ofthe Croatian Redaction of Church slavonic (acr. DCRCS),but due to its features, it serves as a prime sour:
ce forvarious linguistic investigations and other types of research.

1 _ Forthe meaning of the term diasystem v.Weinreich (1954),cf. Brozović (1970 [1967)): 14.For the CCS and
Croatian vernacular and literary idioms as constituents of one common diasystem v. Katičić (1992).
2 Forthe character of the Croatian/CCs diglossia v. Mihaljević (2010).

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