Slovenian
Read Slovenian from its oldest text to today’s print
The Freising Manuscripts, copied around the year 1000, are the oldest surviving continuous text in Slovene and the oldest Slavic text written in the Latin alphabet at all, spelled out with no settled orthography to follow. Slovene then argued out two rival Latin spelling systems for the better part of three centuries, while for two centuries of Austrian rule its names sat inside documents written mostly in German Kurrent. Evidano reads every one of these stages and shows the source page beside every line it produces.
Sample pages
Real pages from public collections, shown beside their transcriptions. Pages whose transcription is still being checked are marked.
Bavarian State Library, Munich, c. 1000 · Source · Public domain
Transcription being verified
A critical diplomatic transcription of this text is published in the Inštitut za slovensko literaturo in literarne vede’s Monumenta Frisingensia electronic edition (2007), hosted on Slovenian Wikisource by permission; not reproduced here as that specific edition is not confirmed to be freely licensed for reuse.
What the model is told to watch for: Produce a diplomatic transcription in Slovenian.
National and University Library, Ljubljana (dLib.si), 1550 · Source · CC0 1.0
Transcription being verified
Trubar’s Catechismus has been reprinted in facsimile by the National and University Library of Slovenia; a transcription matched line by line to this specific preface page has not been located.
What the model is told to watch for: Produce a diplomatic transcription in Slovenian.
Archives of the Republic of Slovenia (SI AS 174, L285), 18th century · Source · Public domain
Transcription being verified
This is an unpublished archival register; no transcription has been located.
What the model is told to watch for: Produce a diplomatic transcription in Slovenian.
Transcription being verified
Digitised at dLib.si; a human-proofread transcription of this specific issue has not been located.
What the model is told to watch for: Produce a diplomatic transcription in Slovenian.
National and University Library, Ljubljana, 1831 · Source · Public domain
Transcription
The whole page: the heading and all six numbered plate descriptions. The Slovenian Wikisource text is a proofread reading edition rather than a diplomatic one — it transliterates Dajnko’s special letters into the modern Slovene č, š and ž, so the printed Xelezna is given as Železna and koʙ as koš, and it drops the italics the printer used for the word Obraz and for the figure letters. Each numbered entry is set here as one line.
OBRAZNI RASKAZ. Obraz 1. Is treh slamnih svitkov a. b. c. naréden stojéči koš, kak na letnemi skladi stojí. Obraz 2. Železna zapinja, s' kero se slamni svitki eden na drugega zapinjajo. Obraz 3. Letni sklad od zadnega strana: a. b. c. d. zgorni okraj, na keremi se slamni svitki znajdejo; e. zadne dverca, kere se na podmétanje, ali pri odrojuvanji odprejo; f. letna lukna vu prednemi strani. Obraz 4. Potisek e. za pomenšavanje ali povekšavanje letne lukne vu letnemi skladi d. Obraz 5. Is treh slamnih svitkov a. b. c. nareden ležéči koš, z' letno lukno vu prednemi pokrivali pri d. Obraz 6. Železen svor, s' kerim se pokrivalni deski na desečne sklade privertavajo.
Transcription from Čelarstvo (1831), Stran 34, proofread text via Slovenian Wikisource (CC BY-SA 4.0).
What Slovenian writing has looked like
The Freising Manuscripts survive bound into a Bavarian codex now held at Munich: two confession formulas and a sermon on sin and penance, copied by a German-trained scribe around the year 1000 from an older Slovene original. Because no Slavic Latin spelling existed yet, the scribe reached for German scribal habits to represent sounds Latin had no letters for, so the same Slovene sound can appear spelled two or three different ways within a few lines. The result predates every other Latin-alphabet Slavic text and is one of the very few written traces of the Alpine Slavic mission the Salzburg diocese ran among Carantania’s Slovene-speaking population.
A settled Slovene orthography took another five and a half centuries to arrive. Primož Trubar’s Catechismus of 1550, the first printed Slovene book, spelled sounds with digraphs of his own devising, and Adam Bohorič’s 1584 grammar fixed a related digraph system, bohoričica, using sh for š, zh for č and similar combinations, that lasted into the nineteenth century. Rival alphabets followed: Franc Metelko proposed a set of special diacritic letters in the 1820s, Peter Dajnko another in the same decade, and the resulting "črkarska pravda", the orthography war of the 1830s, ended only when Slovene writers adopted Ljudevit Gaj’s Croatian-style č, š and ž, fixed as the standard from the late 1840s and unchanged since.
Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Carniola, Styria and Carinthia kept their official records in German, written in Kurrent cursive, whose broken, angular letterforms bear no resemblance to Latin cursive. Theresian and Franciscean cadastral surveys, parish registers and estate ledgers list Slovene tenants, hamlets and field names inside otherwise German entries, so a single line can carry a Slovene surname spelled by a German-trained clerk’s ear in the middle of an otherwise German sentence.
Why ordinary OCR struggles here
No settled spelling in the oldest text
The Freising Manuscripts spell Slovene sounds ad hoc, borrowing German scribal conventions letter by letter rather than following any Slavic orthography, since none existed. A system trained on modern Slovene spelling has nothing to match this against and misreads it as garbled Latin.
Digraphs that look like ordinary letter pairs
Bohoričica’s sh, zh and similar combinations stand for single sounds, not two letters read separately, and the obsolete special characters Metelko and Dajnko each proposed have no modern keyboard equivalent at all. A system has to know which spelling system a page uses before it can read it correctly.
Slovene names inside German Kurrent
Austrian cadastral and parish records are written in German Kurrent cursive, whose letterforms differ sharply from Latin script, and the Slovene personal and place names scattered through them were spelled by German-trained clerks who often guessed at the sounds. A system tuned only to German expects German name patterns and mangles the Slovene ones.
Several spelling systems on one archive shelf
A single family or parish archive can span Freising-style ad hoc spelling in transcribed extracts, bohoričica in an eighteenth-century book, and modern gajica in a twentieth-century letter, so no single fixed spelling rule works across the whole collection.
Who works with this material
Slavicists and medievalists
Scholars working on the Freising Manuscripts and the earliest Alpine Slavic mission sources need a reading that respects the tenth-century scribe’s ad hoc spelling rather than one that silently corrects it toward modern Slovene.
Historians of Slovenian print and orthography
Tracing the shift from Trubar’s spelling through bohoričica to the Metelko, Dajnko and Gaj alphabets means reading each system on its own terms, since a page cannot be understood if its digraphs or special letters are misread as something else.
Genealogists and archivists reading Austrian-era records
Parish registers, cadastral surveys and estate ledgers from Carniola, Styria and Carinthia carry Slovene names inside German Kurrent text. Family historians and archive staff need those names read as Slovene, not forced into German spelling patterns.
Newspaper and periodical digitisation projects
Slovenian libraries and local history societies hold large runs of nineteenth- and twentieth-century weeklies and newspapers that are scanned but not always searchable as text, and need reliable transcription to make them so.
Getting the best transcription
Name the spelling stage
Say whether a page uses Freising-style ad hoc spelling, bohoričica digraphs, the Metelko or Dajnko letters, or modern gajica, so the model does not silently convert older spelling to today’s alphabet unless you ask for that.
Flag Slovene names inside German Kurrent
For cadastral and parish records, note that personal and place names may be Slovene even though the surrounding text is German, so those words are read as Slovene rather than forced into German spelling patterns.
Decide how to handle digraphs
Choose whether bohoričica combinations such as sh and zh should be kept as printed or converted to their modern š and č equivalents, and apply that choice consistently across a whole book or archive.
Test on a name you can check
Before transcribing a full parish register or cadastre, run a page with a place or personal name you can independently verify, so a spelling or script error is caught before it repeats through the rest of the volume.
Frequently asked questions
- Can Evidano read the Freising Manuscripts’ unusual spelling?
- Yes, the ad hoc, German-influenced spelling of the tenth-century original is read as written rather than corrected toward modern Slovene, which matters for anyone studying the text’s language history.
- Does it recognise bohoričica digraphs like sh and zh as single sounds?
- Yes, once you note that a page uses bohoričica, these combinations are read as the single sounds they represent, and you can ask for them either kept as printed or converted to modern š and č.
- What about the Metelko or Dajnko alphabets?
- Both are recognised as historic Slovene spelling systems in their own right, with their special letters read as the sounds they were designed for rather than as unfamiliar symbols.
- Can it separate Slovene names from the German Kurrent around them?
- Yes, once told to expect them, Slovene personal and place names embedded in German cadastral or parish entries are read as Slovene rather than mangled into German spelling patterns.
- Does it handle modern Slovenian č, š and ž correctly?
- Yes, in both printed and handwritten modern Slovenian these are recognised as distinct letters, which matters most for names and places in forms, registers and correspondence.
Related scripts and pages
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