Heinz Miklas

The article contains some results of analyses of the Vienna part of the Codex Marianus (ÖNB, Vind. slav. 146), undertaken by an interdisciplinary group of scholars and scientists from the Centre of Image and Material Analysis in Cultural Heritage (CIMA ‒ www.cima@or.at) within two Austrian Science Fund-projects devoted to the ancient Glagolitic heritage. The investigation consisted of four parts, codicological, multispectral, chemical and philological. While the codicological survey served to get as much information as possible about the writing material (source of parchment, methods of preparation, writing process, deletions, condition), color and multispectral recordings had been made to preserve the manuscript at its best and to provide an apt basis for further investigations. The chemical analysis was executed with two portable spectroscopes (XRF and rFTIR) and aimed to get exact information on the parchment, the inks, paints and binders, and to collect data for a comparative study of parchment degradation. The philologists analysed the fragment comparatively with all other Old Church Slavonic-Glagolitic manuscripts preserved to get as much information as possible about their scribes.

The paper proposes an encoding standard for early Cyrillic characters and glyphs that are still missing in the Universal Character Set (UCS) of the Unicode Standard and for different reasons will probably never be included, but are nevertheless used by the paleoslavistic community. This micro-standard is meant to expand, not to replace the Unicode standard and follows the path chosen by the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative (MUFI) a few years ago for the Latin script (see http://www.hit.uib.no/mufi/). Starting from the inventory of Old Cyrillic originally proposed at the conference held in Belgrade on 15–17 October 2007 (see BP), and taking in view the recommendations given by Birnbaum et al. 2008 and the MUFI-consortium, the chosen set is limited to 178 units with a specific function (characters and composites, superscript characters, modifier characters, and punctuation marks), which are located in the Private Use Area (PUA). Their positions (code points) are coordinated with MUFI. This set we will call PUA1. In the future a second set PUA2 will be proposed for a number of ligatures and paleographic variants that may not be coordinated with MUFI and are intended for special publications addressed to Slavistic readers. It is hoped that the proposed PUA encoding for Early Cyrillic Symbols, for which we choose the abbreviation CYFI, will establish itself as a sort of micro-standardization. Designers of scholarly fonts are encouraged to include these symbols according to this proposal (see code points in the appendix).

The authors of the paper propose the elaboration of a Standard of the Old Slavonic Glagolitic Script according to the model of the Standard of the Old Slavonic Cyrillic Script, proposed at the Belgrade conference of October 2007 and adopted in June 2008 (cf.: http://www.cirilica.net or http://www.sanu.ac.rs/Cirilica/Cirilica.aspx). As a first contribution to this aim they have compiled a parallel Glagolitic-Cyrillic character table with majuscule and minuscule characters (on the line), but no superscript letters, diacritical and punctuation marks, or (specific) numbers. The primary purpose of this partial inventory is to enable the transliteration of the Old Slavonic scripts in their various spatiotemporal versions (redactions). Thus, in addition to the Glagolitic-Cyrillic set two Latin transliterations are offered: 1. the traditional one (of the "broad transliteration" type), mainly for comparison, and 2. a computerized one ("narrow transliteration" type) which takes account of the character shape and enables one-to-one transliteration from one script (writing system) into another. Of the extant ways of automated transliteration: in special systems like XSLT, via search/replace routines that can be automated via macros and via the use of different fonts specifically designed for transliteration purposes - for the time being the last, most convenient way has been chosen. Readers may find these fonts together with the keyboard layout on: http://www.cirilica.net.