Saturday, October 15, 2005

From Old Books

This text of the Lord's Prayer is from Oratio Dominica: The Lord's Prayer in above 100 Languages, Versions and Characters by Dan Brown, published in 1713.

While this text was printed in 1715, the notes in the margin indicate that this version of the Lord's Prayer is from a text dated 1581. Click on this image to enlarge or see it here (warning: Give it a minute or two to download - as it is 3880x5568) or on page 8, From Old Books, Oratio Dominica.

This website From Old Books provides a complete page-by-page scan of Oratio Dominica and offers many hours of browsing through pages of old books. Many thanks to Liam for making these images available.

Addendum: There are marks that appear to be aspiration marks in this text. I find a reference to these marks on page 2 of this document.

"The Slavonic writing system was influenced also by the fact that many texts were copied from the original Greek sources—so, the aspiration symbols (hard and soft) are placed arbitrarily and mean nothing in Slavonic texts;"

This is supported by the note,
"Some sources insist that aspirations are conserved in Old Slavonic texts for calligraphic reasons only and are copied directly from the Greek texts; some sources [16] state that placing of aspiration symbols is not arbitrary—although we don’t know exactly what they mean, they are somehow connected with the pronunciation, as in every writing system apart from Hebrew. Nobody knows the truth . . ."

16 Nikolai Serikoff: private communication.

Old Slavonic and Church Slavonic in TEX and Unicode, Alexander Berdnikov, Olga Lapko (pdf)

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