Literary Excerpt: Marulić (Renaissance)

Marko Marulić (1450–1524), the "father of Croatian literature," wrote Judita in Split in 1501 and saw it printed in Venice in 1521 — the first major work of artistic literature composed in Croatian. He died in 1524, so the text is firmly in the public domain, and the short excerpt below is a genuine quotation of the opening invocation (posveta) with attribution. Marulić wrote in the Čakavian dialect of Dalmatia with strongly ikavian vowel reflexes, in a sixteenth-century orthography. To make the grammar legible the spelling below is lightly normalised to modern Croatian Latin script (resolving the old apostrophes and parenthetical letters), but the forms themselves — the ikavisms, the archaic syntax — are left exactly as Marulić wrote them. This is what literary Croatian looked like five hundred years ago.

The text

Ikavian reflexes: svitlost, vira, dite

The single most visible feature of Marulić's Croatian is its ikavian reflex of the old Slavic vowel jat (ě). Where modern standard Croatian — which is built on an ijekavian base — writes ije in long syllables and je in short ones, Marulić's Dalmatian Čakavian simply writes i. So his svitlost is the standard svjetlost ("light"), his vira is vjera ("faith"), his dite is dijete ("child"), and his misto is mjesto ("place"). The reflex is perfectly regular: every jat becomes i. Reading Marulić, a modern Croatian speaker mentally runs the substitution i → je/ije and the text snaps into focus.

Archaic and Čakavian forms: nje, ter, htij

Beyond the vowels, the grammar itself is older. nje in smina nje stvorenja is the archaic genitive of the third-person feminine pronoun — modern Croatian uses njezina / njena ("her") as a possessive, but the old language could place the bare genitive pronoun nje before the noun: nje stvorenja = "of her deed / her deed's." ter is an archaic and Čakavian coordinating conjunction meaning "and, and so" — the everyday modern equivalent is te or simply i. And htij is an old imperative of htjeti ("to want"); Marulić writes ne htij mi kratiti ("do not wish to refuse me"), where modern Croatian would prefer nemoj mi kratiti with the negative auxiliary nemoj.

Older syntax: smina as a postposed long adjective, hoću + infinitive

Marulić's word order is freer and more Latinate than modern prose. In smina nje stvorenja ("of her brave deed"), the adjective smina (modern smiona, "bold, brave," feminine genitive) sits in front of the whole phrase rather than hugging its noun, and the possessive nje is wedged between adjective and noun — an order that reads as elevated and old. The verb phrase hoću govoriti ("I wish to speak") uses htjeti + bare infinitive as a near-future / volitional periphrasis; this is the ancestor of the modern Croatian future tense (govorit ću), still transparent here because the auxiliary has not yet fused into a clitic.

The vocative and the address to God: Bože, svitlost

The invocation is built on apostrophe — a direct address to God — and so it leans on the vocative case. Bože! is the vocative of Bog ("God"), with the regular masculine vocative ending -e and the predictable g → ž palatalisation before it. This is exactly the form a Croatian speaker still uses today (Bože moj!, "my God!"). Marulić's zato ću moliti, Bože, tvoju svitlost sets the addressee (God) in the vocative and the thing prayed for (svitlost, "light/glory") in the accusative — a clean older example of the vocative doing the work of address while the case system marks everything else.

Vocabulary gloss

Two register notes. ter and the bare possessive nje are unambiguously (archaic) today — you would meet them only in old texts, in some Čakavian speech, or in deliberate stylisation. The ikavisms (svitlost, vira, dite, misto) are (archaic) in this spelling, but the underlying ikavian forms are very much alive as (regional: Dalmatia, Istria, western Herzegovina) — a coastal speaker still says dite and misto in everyday talk.

How the grammar serves the passage

Marulić is doing something audacious: writing a Latin-style humanist epic in the vernacular of Split. Every grammatical feature on this page is a snapshot of that vernacular at the moment it became literary. The ikavian svitlost and vira fix the text geographically in Dalmatia. The archaic ter, nje and htij show a grammar that had not yet been standardised — there was no "standard Croatian" in 1501, only living dialects. The unfused hoću govoriti catches the future tense mid-formation. And the vocative Bože anchors the whole invocation in direct, devotional address. To read these four lines is to watch Croatian step into literature — already fully expressive, but in a shape the modern reader must consciously decode.

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