Czech · Image to Text
Bohemian hands, from parchment charters to ruled registers
The written record of the Czech lands runs through four alphabets’ worth of habits: Latin charters with Czech names, Gothic and Bastarda book hands, Hussite polemic in two languages, Habsburg chancery cursive and finally German Kurrent in printed forms. Evidano reads each of them as the hand it is, and keeps the languages on a page apart.
Choose the hand or document type
Medieval Bohemian Latin Caroline and Gothic Recordsc. 1000–1300Transcribe Bohemian charters, chronicles and codices of c. 1000–1300: Caroline and early Gothic hands, dense abbreviation and Latinised Czech names.
Old Czech Gothic and Bastarda Manuscriptsc. 1300–1500Transcribe Old Czech in Gothic Textualis, Bastarda and cursive: digraph spelling, r rotunda, minim thickets and Latin abbreviations on the same page.
Hussite and Utraquist Czech-Latin Manuscriptsc. 1400–1550Transcribe Hussite hymnals, polemics and Utraquist liturgy: Czech and Latin in one hand, red rubrics, chant notation and layers of annotation.
Habsburg Bohemian Chancery Records in Czech, German, and Latinc. 1526–1800Transcribe Bohemian charters, patents and prints of 1526–1800: Czech chancery hands, German Fraktur, Latin formulas and script changes by language.
Central European Kurrent Parish and Civil Recordsc. 1700–1918Transcribe Habsburg parish registers, cadastral sheets and police forms: German Kurrent entries, Latin and Czech headings and ruled columns.
Transcribing Czech across the centuries
The oldest material is Latin: foundation charters, the chronicle of Cosmas, gospel books written in Caroline and early Gothic hands, with Czech surfacing only in place names and in the occasional gloss. From the fourteenth century Czech becomes a language of books, written in Gothic Textualis and Bastarda and spelled with digraphs — cz, rz, ss — because the Latin alphabet had no letters for its sounds. The Hussite decades fill the fifteenth century with hymnals, sermons and polemical compilations in which Czech and Latin alternate paragraph by paragraph, and in which the first diacritics start to replace the old digraphs.
After 1526 the Habsburg chanceries work in Czech, German and Latin at once, switching language at a clause boundary and typeface within a line. From the eighteenth century the paperwork of ordinary life — parish registers, cadastral sheets, conscription and residence cards — is written in German Kurrent on printed forms, whatever the language of the family being recorded, until Czech printing and Latin script return to the columns in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Editors of medieval texts, historians of the Reformation, archivists digitising town collections, demographers working from register grids and genealogists tracing a family through Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia all meet the same obstacle: a page in a script and a spelling that no longer look like the modern language. A transcription that follows the letterforms and marks what it cannot read is where their work starts.
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