Pre-Vuk Serbian Orthographies

There was no single “pre-Vuk Serbian alphabet.” A manuscript in Serbian Church Slavonic, a Russo-Slavonic schoolbook, a civil-type Slavonic-Serbian periodical, and an early reform text can use different inventories and different rules even within one century. This page treats them as four dated traditions and keeps three editorial operations separate: reproducing the Cyrillic, transliterating its characters, and normalizing its language.

For the later phonemic system, see the Vuk reform. The conventions below are for reading historical sources, not for composing contemporary Serbian.

One reproducible transliteration key

This page uses a graphemic transliteration: each historical Cyrillic sign receives the same Latin output wherever it occurs. It does not claim to reproduce pronunciation. Modern letters use their Serbian Latin equivalents; in particular, ј/љ/њ/ћ/ђ/џ are j/lj/nj/ć/đ/dž. The following additions make older graphs distinguishable.

This is an editorial key, not a universal standard. It deliberately writes ŝ for щ and ÿ for ѵ so that the original character can be recovered. If an archive uses another scheme, copy its key rather than silently combining systems.

Four traditions and their dated inventories

The lists below are operative inventories: base letters plus the additional signs and conventions documented for the named witness or print tradition. Church alphabets were not identical across every manuscript, so a responsible edition reports its witness rather than inventing a timeless master list.

1. Serbian Church Slavonic manuscript practice: 1717

Gavril Stefanović Venclović's Szentendre Primer (1717), known through a phototype and scholarly edition, represents late Serbian Church Slavonic manuscript practice. Its ordinary base is а б в г д е ж з и к л м н о п р с т у ф х ц ч ш. The edition additionally documents a one-yer orthography, й, pre-iotated vowels, ѣ, ы, Greek-derived letters, a special z-shaped graph of the Resava tradition, and rare ћ and ђ. It also records three abbreviation techniques, superscript letters, accents and breathings, and Greek-modeled punctuation.

A fuller Church inventory from which such witnesses select signs is conventionally ordered:

а б в г д є ж ѕ з и і к л м н ѡ о п р с т ѹ у ф х ѿ ц ч ш щ ъ ы ь ѣ ю ꙗ ѥ ѧ ѩ ѫ ѭ ѯ ѱ ѳ ѵ.

Not every letter appears in every 1717 text, and й may be used without receiving its own alphabet slot. That difference between inventory and attestation is essential.

The superscript and titlo are not decorative accents. They can abbreviate sacred names, mark omitted material, or give letters numerical value. Church stress marks and breathings likewise belong to that orthographic system; they are not the four lexical accent marks of modern Serbian dictionaries.

2. Russo-Slavonic school print for Serbian readers: 1726–1767

Russian Church Slavonic entered Serbian schools decisively after the 1720s. A Russo-Slavonic primer was reprinted for Serbian use at Râmnic in 1726. Zaharija Orfelin's 1767 Первое ученїе, issued explicitly for Сербскагѡ Юношества, continued this church-type educational tradition.

Its working inventory uses the Church base and such book letters as є, і, ї, ѡ, ѿ, ѹ/ꙋ, щ, ъ, ы, ь, ѣ, ю, ѧ, ѯ, ѱ, ѳ, ѵ, with supralinear signs and abbreviations. Russian-recension distribution differs from older Serbian-recension practice: the same shape may have a different conventional placement or reading. This is why “it looks Russian” is not an adequate identification.

The National Library of Serbia catalogue diplomatically records the 1767 title opening:

Under this page's key, the beginning is Pervoe učenïe Hotęštymʺ učitisę knigʺ pismeny Slavenskimi nazyvaemoe Boukvarʹ. That is diplomatic Latin transliteration. The English line is a lexical translation, not a character conversion.

3. Civil-type Slavonic-Serbian print: 1768 and after

Civil type (грађаница) replaced many ornate Church letterforms with simpler printed shapes. It did not automatically turn the language into vernacular Serbian. Orfelin's 1768 Slavonic-Serbian Magazine is a securely dated civil-type witness whose title page reads:

Its civil inventory is built on а б в г д е ж з и і й к л м н о п р с т у ф х ц ч ш щ ъ ы ь ѣ э ю я ѳ ѵ; individual Serbian books also employ local signs and digraphs, including ћ and spellings for Serbian palatals. The title itself attests і, й, ъ, ѣ, and ї. Unlike Church printing, civil type normally dispenses with most breathings, titla, and ornate ligatures.

Our diplomatic transliteration is SLAVENO-SERBSKĪĬ MAGAZINʺ to estʹ SOBRANĪE raznyhʺ sočinenïĭ i prevodovʺ. A lexical modern Serbian title is Славеносрпски магазин, то јест зборник различитих списа и превода. This changes vocabulary and inflection as well as graphs, so it must never be labeled mere transliteration.

4. Transitional reform usage: 1810–1818

Sava Mrkalj's 1810 proposal reduced the system to 25 sound-bearing monographs—а б в г д е ж з и ї к л м н о п р с т у ф х ц ч ш—plus auxiliary ь. It wrote /j/ with ї and used дь, ть, ль, нь for the consonants later written ђ, ћ, љ, њ. Thus “29 letters” in summaries often means 25 independent sound letters plus four soft-sign digraphs; ь itself is an auxiliary graph, not a Serbian phoneme.

Vuk's 1814 Pismenica drew on this reduction, while private correspondence could still use mixed civil Slavonic-Serbian spelling. The 1818 dictionary established the modern thirty-letter inventory, including ј, љ, њ, ћ, ђ, џ. Adoption remained gradual, but the structural goal was now one letter per phoneme.

An authenticated 1814 excerpt in four layers

Aleksandar Milanović's scholarly discussion quotes Vuk's first preserved letter to Jernej Kopitar from early 1814, using the critical edition of Vuk's correspondence. The /9 that follows 20тим in the article's running text is a footnote marker, not part of the historical number. The excerpt below removes that editorial marker and restores genuine Unicode ѣ where the PDF's embedded font maps jat incorrectly:

The layers must be labeled:

1. Diplomatic Cyrillic: the line above preserves capitalization, punctuation, ѣ, і, й, ю, ъ, and historical morphology.
2. Diplomatic Latin: Vaše pozivaně k recenziranju Slaveno-Serbski knʺiga (:pod 20tim čislom tekućega měseca:) primīo sam s naĭvećim visokopočitanīem. No vocabulary has been modernized.
3. Graphemic plus Ekavian reading: Ваше позивање к рецензирању Славено-Сербски књига (:под 20тим числом текућега месеца:) примио сам с највећим високопочитанијем. Obsolete graphs are interpreted, while historical forms remain visible.
4. Lexical and morphological normalization, Ekavian: Ваш позив да рецензирам славеносрпске књиге, под бројем 20 текућег месеца, примио сам с највећим поштовањем.

The phrase подъ 20тимъ числомъ, when found with final hard signs in another diplomatic convention, means roughly под бројем 20—“under number 20.” It does not mean “dated the twentieth.” In Vuk's Ijekavian speech, мѣсеца could be read мјесеца; this guide's productive normalization is explicitly Ekavian месеца.

Typography, order, and editorial uncertainty

Church manuscripts may use ustav, semi-ustav, or cursive shapes. Civil italics can make т, г, д look unfamiliar, while і resembles Latin i; OCR commonly confuses ѣ, ъ, ь, and superscripts. A transcriber should compare repeated letterforms and mark an unread graph with editorial brackets rather than silently inventing a modern letter.

Alphabetical order also belongs to the source. Church primers follow named-letter order beginning аз, буки, веди, глаголь; civil books generally follow the pre-1918 Russian sequence, in which і follows и, while ѣ, ѳ, ѵ have historical slots. Mrkalj's reduced sequence and today's thirty-letter Serbian order are different again. A modern catalogue may supply a normalized access heading, but a diplomatic index must document its collation rule.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

Pre-Vuk sources belong to distinct, overlapping traditions. Identify the dated witness, preserve its typography and abbreviations, transliterate with one declared key, and only then normalize. A modern Ekavian or Ijekavian rendering is an editorial interpretation—not the original spelling in a different font.