BARTOLOMEO KASIĆ'S ORTHOGRAPHIC GUIDES FOR WRITING IN LATIN SCRIPT

Croatian grammarian, spiritual writer, and translator Bartolomeo Kasić published brief orthographic guides (4 to 5 pages) in four publications he prepared for print and published between 1613 and 1617 and again in 1633; in them, he explained how to phonetically articulate and read the combinations of letters in these books. The first orthographic guides published from 1613 to 1617 are actually the same text with slight modifications in certain expressions. The orthographic guide from 1633 was thoroughly reformulated and some orthographic forms were changed. Kasić's fundamental orthographic principles are univocity and the intent for one letter to always represent the same phonetic articulation. While he did achieve a high degree of univocity, Kasić was unable to overcome the southern Croatian tradition of writing certain phonemes with combinations of letters as in the Italian orthographic tradition. He pondered issues of language and orthography his entire life, records of which he left in his autobiography; the orthographic guides analysed in this paper show his development and dilemmas surrounding this topic. Keywords: Bartolomeo Kasić; Navk za dobro pijsatti Slovinski; orthography; Croatian language, Society of Jesus.