[DCRM-L] DCRM(B) 7B9. Nonroman signatures

[Joseph Ross]

Deborah and others,

I was not able to attend the Bibliographic Standards Committee discussion 
of the epsilon draft of DCRM(B) so I do not know what discussion took place 
concerning  "7B9. Nonroman signatures", but I would like to send my 
comments and hope that they do not duplicate comments already made or 
issues already settled.  I hope that others who work with early Slavic 
language material will also comment on this.

I like the fact that the rules are calling for the vernacular transcription 
of the letters and/or ALA/LC transliteration for the signatures.  This is a 
great improvement over the earlier drafts, which specified using the names 
of letters for Hebrew and Greek and using numbers to indicate the total 
number of signed gatherings in all other non-Roman alphabets.

For Cyrillic alphabet signatures, I feel very strongly that we need to 
instruct catalogers to give not only the initial and final letters of the 
alphabet but also to indicate the number of letters in the alphabet.  This 
is unnecessary for Roman or Latin alphabet signatures because there is a 
standard twenty-three letter alphabet, and one can easily infer how many 
signed gatherings are indicated by the signature statement.  Where the 
printer varies from the standard twenty-three letter alphabet, the standard 
practice is to indicate where it diverges, e.g., A-I J-U V-Z, and thus one 
is able to infer the number of signed gatherings even in a non-standard 
alphabet.

If one simply transliterates the letters of the Cyrillic alphabet from the 
sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one has no idea how many 
signed gatherings are being indicated.  A forty-two or forty-five letter 
Cyrillic alphabet is common in the seventeenth century, but I have seen 
many bibliographic references to forty-one and forty-three letter signature 
alphabets.  The signature statement thus loses a great deal of its 
bibliographic value if one only indicates the initial and final letters of 
a Cyrillic alphabet.

What is needed is a statement of the number of letters in the alphabet or 
"register".  Where multiple sequences of the alphabet are given, it is 
sufficient to indicate how many letters are found in an  alphabetic series, 
not the total number of signed gatherings.  If there is only a partial 
alphabet, an indication of the number of letters in the partial series 
should be given.

This is the common practice for bibliographic descriptions of early 
Cyrillic imprints at least in those bibliographies that 
indicate  signatures that I have seen.  I have also seen it 
on  several  OCLC records, e.g.,  #40873562 and #60683108.

I would suggest, therefore, that instructions be given to indicate the 
number of letters in an alphabetic series or in a partial series in the 
case of Cyrillic alphabet signatures.

I also would like further clarification in the editorial note, which now 
reads:  "Not all Cyrillic alphabets have the same number of characters."
In its place, I would like a statement like that which follows so that it 
is clear to the cataloger the degree of variability in the Cyrillic 
alphabet in the first several centuries of printing.

"In Slavic language areas that used the Cyrillic alphabet, no standard 
alphabet was used for printing signatures  as the twenty-three letter Roman 
alphabet was used for signatures in western Europe.  The Cyrillic alphabet 
itself is still undergoing considerable change at the time when printing is 
introduced into these areas.   The number of letters varies considerably in 
the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries from forty-five to thirty-five 
letters, and the exact repertoire of letters and their forms also vary from 
one printer to another.   Some Greek letters were commonly found in the 
alphabet because they were needed for the Church Slavic numerals, which 
were based upon Greek numerals and therefore borrowed letters from the 
Greek alphabet when there were no equivalent letters in the 
Cyrillic  alphabet.   Some other letters were seldom used because they 
represented nasal vowels, which were lost as the languages developed.  In 
the eighteenth-century, Peter the Great began a revision of the alphabet to 
eliminate letters no longer used, and in other Slavic areas that used 
Cyrillic alphabets, reforms of the alphabet were undertaken  in the 
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to simplify the alphabets and eliminate 
letters that were not needed for particular languages."

If this is too wordy, I would welcome any attempts to make it more concise, 
but I hope we can keep the general focus of the statement in the rule.

Thank you for taking these comments into consideration.  I hope that other 
catalogers who have worked with early Cyrillic imprints will add their own 
comments.

Joe Ross
Rare Books Cataloger
University of Notre Dame



   At 12:06 PM 6/17/2005, you wrote:
>Dear Colleagues,
>
>Discussion questions for the draft of DCRM(B) dated 20050531 have been
>posted on the DCRM(B) draft texts page,
>http://www.folger.edu/bsc/dcrb/dcrmtext.html
>Direct link is http://www.folger.edu/bsc/dcrb/2005.2discussion.html
>
>Because these questions represent issues that have not yet been agreed
>on and/or are controversial, the DCRM(B) editors are especially
>interested in responses to these questions, at the meeting or in writing
>until 31 August 2005.
>
>________________________________
>Deborah J. Leslie, M.A., M.L.S.
>Head of Cataloging
>Folger Shakespeare Library
>201 East Capitol St., SE
>Washington, DC 20003
>202.675-0369
>djleslie at folger.edu
>