Srpski kao diplomatski jezik na Porti krajem XV veka: na primeru pisma sultana Bajazita II ugarskom kralju Matiji Korvinu

Abstract

The subject of the paper is a philological analysis of the letter by the Turkish sultan Bayezid II to the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus (January 2nd, 1487), one of the few direct testimonies of the usage of the Serbian language in diplomatic correspondence sent from the Ottoman court to Hungary during the 15th century. In addition to the edition of the text of the letter in the original script, the paper presents the most important graphic, orthographic and linguistic features of the letter, as well as a comparison with the letters of Sultan Bayezid II addressed to Dubrovnik. The analysis of the graphic features and orthography demonstrated that the features of the Raška script prevail in the letter, with the presence of a smaller number of Resava features, characteristic of the majority of Bayezid II’s letters addressed to Dubrovnik. The most important linguistic features point to the conclusion that the written Serbian language was built on the basis of the southeastern Serbian dialect of the 15th century, as evidenced by examples of ekavism in a number of categories typical of contemporary Kosovo-Resavian and/or Prizren-South Moravian varieties, examples of the vowel /a/ < /ə/ , /u/ < vocalized /l/, /o/ < /l/ at the end of a syllable, as well as examples of analytical tendencies in declension. Examples of vowels /e/ and /o/ < /ə/ are recorded in the letter, which may point to the influence of Prizren-South Moravian varieties from the Serbian and Macedonian border or to lexicalized Macedonianisms originating from Serbian Church Slavonic. Several linguistic features, among which the frequent use of the preterite participle active in the function of an independent predicate (gerund), indicate that the scribe was familiar with the norms of the Serbian Church Slavonic language. The correspondence of the most important features of this letter with several letters of Bayezid II to Dubrovnik from the end of the ninth decade of the 15th century confirms the conclusion of I. Biljarski that the letter was addressed to the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus, rather than to his successor Vladislav II.