19 February 2025
For the Love of Books: European Collections at the British Library Doctoral Open Days
On February 14, European Collections featured at Doctoral Open Day themed ‘Global Languages, Cultures and Societies’. Marja Kingma, Curator of Germanic Collections, delivered a presentation introducing PhD students from across the UK and beyond to navigating the collections and identifying resources to support their research. In the afternoon, our curators hosted a show-and-tell session, offering the students a glimpse into the Library's unmatched holdings from continental Europe. The selections ranged from a quirky bottle-shaped Czech book to a Russian glossy LGBT magazine and a modern illuminated manuscript from Georgia. Spoiler alert – love-themed curatorial picks proved crowd pleasers. For those who could not make it, here is a taster of what you might have missed.
Katya Rogatchevskaia, Lead Curator of Slavonic and East European Collections, Olga Topol and Hanna Dettlaff-Kuznicka, Curators of Slavonic and East European Collections, turned the spotlight on minority languages and cultures, giving voice to the Evenks, Sakha, Kashubians, Silesians, and the Gagauz people of Ukraine. It was a revelation to many of the students to learn that Eastern Europe was both linguistically and culturally diverse, with a plethora of languages, ethnicities, and religious traditions across the region.
V. A. Dʹiachenko, N. V. Ermolova, Evenki i iakuty iuga Dalʹnego Vostoka, XVII-XX vv. (St. Petersburg, 1994) YA.1997.a.2298.
Marcin Melon, Kōmisorz Hanusik: we tajnyj sużbie ślonskij nacyje (Kotōrz Mały, 2015) YF.2017.a.20547. An interesting example of a crime comedy written in the Silesian ethnolect.
Milan Grba, Lead Curator of South-East European Collections, highlighted a groundbreaking work by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Srpski rječnik (‘Serbian Dictionary’), which proved very popular among researchers with an interest in linguistics.
Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Srpski rječnik (Vienna, 1818) 12976.r.6.
It was the first book printed in Karadžić’s reformed 30-character Cyrillic alphabet, following the phonetic principle of "write as you speak." The dictionary contained over 26,000 words and was trilingual, with Serbian, German, and Latin entries. It standardised Serbian orthography but also preserved the nation’s oral tradition. The dictionary’s encyclopaedic entries encompassed folklore, history, and ethnography, making it a pivotal text in both linguistic reform and cultural preservation.
Anna Chelidze, Curator of Georgian Collections, showed the students a contemporary illuminated manuscript created in 2018 by the Georgian calligrapher Giorgi Sisauri. The Art Palace of Georgia commissioned the work especially for the British Library to enrich our Georgian collections. The poem Kebai da Didebai Kartulisa Enisa ('Praise and Exaltation of the Georgian Language') was written in the 10th century by John Zosimus, a Georgian Christian monk and religious writer. It is renowned for its profound reverence for the Georgian language, employing numerological symbolism and biblical allusions to underscore its sacredness.
(Giorgi Sisauri), John Zosimus, Kebai da Didebai Kartulisa Enisa, (2018) Or. 17158
Sophie Defrance, Valentina Mirabella and Barry Taylor, Curators of Romance Language Collections, treated the students to some ... romance.
Sophie Defrance took a tongue-in-cheek approach to the theme by suggesting another way to look at (some) love letters with Le rire des épistoliers.
Cover of Charrier-Vozel, Marianne, Le rire des épistoliers: XVIe-XVIIIe siècle (Rennes, 2021) YF.2022.a.9956
The volume gathers the proceedings of a 2017 conference at the University of Brest on the expression, manners, and importance of laughing and laughter in 16th- and 17th-century correspondence, with examples from Diderot’s letters to his lover Sophie Volland, or from the exchanges between Benjamin Constant and his confidante Julie Talma.
Valentina Mirabella decided to revisit the Boris Pasternak’s timeless love story ‘Doctor Zhivago’. Turns out, the history of the novel’s publication in Italy was nearly as turbulent as the story itself! It was first published in Italian translation as Il dottor Živago in 1957 by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. Although an active communist, Feltrinelli smuggled the manuscript out of the USSR and resisted pressure against its publication. The demand for Il dottor Živago was so great that Feltrinelli was able to license translation rights into 18 different languages well in advance of the novel's publication. The Communist Party of Italy expelled the publisher from its ranks in retaliation for his role in the release of the book they felt was critical of communism.
Cover of the 34th (in the space of just two years!) edition of Il dottor Živago by Boris Pasternak translated from Russian by Pietro Zveteremich (Milano : Feltrinelli, 1959) W16/9272
Barry Taylor drew attention to the epistolary relationship and an electric bond between the Spanish author Elena Fortún (1886-1952) and the Argentine professor Inés Field (1897-1994) with the book Sabes quién soy: cartas a Inés Field (‘You know who I am: letters to Inés Field’).
Elena Fortún, Sabes quién soy: cartas a Inés Field (Seville, 2020) YF.2021.a.15259
Fortún was the author of the popular Celia books, which followed the heroine from a seven-year-old in well-to-do Madrid to a schoolteacher in Latin America. The books give a child’s-eye-view of the world. They were censored by Franco and the author was exiled, but the books have been re-published by Renacimiento of Seville in the 2000s. Fortún’s novel Oculto sendero (‘The hidden path’) published in 2016 is seen as a lesbian Bildungsroman.
Fortún met Inés Field in Buenos Aires. Now that both women are dead, critics feel free to read the correspondence through the prism of the Bildungsroman.
Ildi Wolner, Curator of East and South-East European Collections, explored the representations of love in art with Agnes’s Hay Sex : 40 rajz = 40 drawings.
Agnes Hay, Sex: 40 rajz = 40 drawings ([Budapest, 1979]) YA.1997.a.2586
Ágnes Háy is a Hungarian graphic artist and animation filmmaker, who has lived in London since 1985. Her unique experimental style of drawing uses simple lines and symbols to convey complex meanings and associations, and this booklet is no exception. Considered rather bold in Communist Hungary at the end of the 1970s, this series of sketches explores the diverse intricacies of gender relations, without the need for a single word of explanation.
Page from Sex : 40 rajz = 40 drawings [Budapest, 1979] YA.1997.a.2586
Susan Reed, Curator of Germanic Collections, shared a fascinating collection of essays examining aspects of the love letter as a social and cultural phenomenon from the 18th century to the present day.
Cover of Der Liebesbrief: Schriftkultur und Medienwechsel vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, herausgegeben von Renate Stauf, Annette Simonis, Jörg Paulus (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008) YF.2010.a.14652
The authors scrutinised letters from historical and literary figures including Otto von Bismark, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Rainer Maria Rilke. The book ends with a consideration of how online messaging forms might transform the way we write love letters.
Ela Kucharska-Beard, Curator of Baltic Collections, displayed a mysterious metal box containing a booklet in English and Lithuanian, some photographs, posters and letters.
Vilma Samulionytė, Liebe Oma, Guten Tag, or The Pact of Silence (Vilnius, 2018) RF.2019.a.120
Liebe Oma, Guten Tag, or The Pact of Silence is a moving tribute from the Lithuanian photographer Vilma Samulionyė to her grandmother, a Lithuanian German Elė Finkytė Šnipaitienė. When Vilma’s grandmother took her own life in her 70s, Vilma and her sister Jūrate decided to delve into the family history. Their research resulted in a documentary film, an exhibition, and an artists’ book. Along the way the sisters face taboos, one of them being a chain of suicides in the family.
The journey into the family’s German history and their post-war life in Lithuania left them with some unsettling questions. Who was Kazimieras and was he the reason why Ella Fink left her family behind? Throughout the story letters and photographs create a link between the family in the West and in the East, between the living and the dead.
We hope you have enjoyed this virtual show-and-tell of highlights in our European collections. We look forward to welcoming you to the next Doctoral Open Days in 2026!
10 July 2020
Coronavirus (Covid-19) ephemera material from Southeast Europe
The British Library has joined forces with the Central and Eastern European Online Library to connect to open access electronic resources and preserve ephemeral material about society and health in Southeast Europe during the pandemic in 2020.
Since 2006 the Central and Eastern European Online Library has provided access for our users to a growing collection of 2,300 humanities and social science journals from Central, East and Southeast Europe. This collection also includes more than 5,500 grey literature items and over 4,200 ebook titles.
A resource ‘Covid-19 in Southeast Europe’ has been created for information and research into the activities of the public health professionals and organisations in the fight against the infection. The resource provides useful data on the provision of public health infrastructure and Covid-19 hospitals, and details of the measures employed in combating the pandemic by country and region within Southeast Europe.
This online resource documents how the appearance of yet another virus from nature, SARS Cov-2, has affected the social, cultural, private and religious life and the health of the peoples of Southeast Europe. The material gathered in one place demonstrates the relativity of any current data comparison, such the one published by Forbes, ‘100 Safest Countries in the World for COVID-19’ , based on the Deep Knowledge Group report, and highlights the importance of locally available data. Some ambiguities and contradictions in publicly available reports demonstrate the lack of world leadership in the pandemic. On the other hand at the local level the data show various attitudes and differences in opinions between experts in advisory roles. These new experiences only serve to show the gravity and uniqueness, scale and complexity of the crisis the world is facing at the moment.
As far as Southeast Europe is concerned, one conclusion that can be drawn is that so far major casualties and the collapse of the healthcare systems have been avoided, and all countries have managed to preserve the functioning of the vital systems of state and society.
“How to protect yourself from a new coronavirus infection” A poster published regularly in the Belgrade daily Politika.
We are grateful to the Serbian public health institute for giving us permission to reuse their open access material, and to the Central and Eastern European Online Library for harvesting and arranging this material for our users.
The symptoms of a new coronavirus. Let us be responsible to ourselves and others.
The new coronavirus - recommendations for children. How to protect yourself against infection
“One - two - three. You too protect yourself".
How to use a mask properly.
Disinfection of the City of Belgrade’s Stari grad borough. Certificate of a building disinfection.
A leaflet from the Sarajevo Institute for Health and Food Safety put in a shop window reads: “Everything will be fine. Follow the prescribed measures and be careful. The coronavirus will pass.”
Other open access content related to research into Covid-19, including scholarly journals, can be located via our Find Electronic Resources pages.
The colleagues and partners in the Central and Eastern European Online Library and the British Library believe that access to e-resources is important, necessary and useful. However, ‘e-only’ – especially in connection with social distancing – cannot and should not replace the real human relations, interactions and encounters, which hopefully will return to our everyday life in the near future.
Milan Grba, Lead Curator South-East European Collections
Bea Klotz and Iulian Tanea, Central and Eastern European Online Library
26 September 2018
Languages of Reckoning: The Gagauz Number System
The more languages you speak, the more perspectives you have on the world. Bulgarian, Czech and Hungarian proverbs capture this observation: ‘Човекът е толкова пъти човек, колкото езика знае’ (Bulgarian: a person is as many times a person as many languages knows), ‘Kolik jazyků znáš, tolikrát jsi člověkem’ (Czech: as many languages you know, as many times as you are a person), ‘Ahány nyelvet beszélsz, annyi ember vagy’ (Hungarian: as many languages you speak, as many persons you are). And a similar proverb has also been attributed to that famous polyglot, Emperor Charles V. By drawing on linguistics and anthropology, Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf suggested that the proverbial language-thought nexus is universal, so that the structure of a language has an influence on the speaker’s thinking and behaviour even if the speaker is unaware of this influence.
Does the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis apply to non-alphabetic – in particular, numeric – languages as well? Learning numeric systems other than the prevailing Arabic and Roman ones, however, would be a challenge, as only a few other systems are preserved in Europe, mainly alphabetic numerals, for instance in Georgian, Greek and Hebrew. Why do we ‘speak’ so few numeric languages in comparison with alphabetic languages? If Sanskrit, the origin of Arabic numerals, and Latin, the origin of Roman numerals, had their own numeral systems, can we assume that each language once had its own symbols for writing numbers? If so, how, when and why did they abandon their own numerals?
A recent addition to the British Library’s Gagauz collection, Gagauz yortulari, adetleri, siralari (Gagauz Holidays, Customs, Rites), presented by the Gagauz linguist and ethnographer, Todur Zanet, in four parallel languages, Gagauz, English, Romanian and Russian, reveals numerals, which seem to be specific to Gagauz (p. 9). Considering how few languages maintained their numerals, the Gagauz model prompts a closer look.
Cover of Todur Zanet, Gagauz yortulari, adetleri, siralari (Gagauz Holidays, Customs, Rites) (Chişinău, 2017) YF.2018.a.9388
Gagauz numerals, from Gagauz yortulari, adetleri, siralari, p. 9
The Gagauz are a Turkic people of Orthodox Eastern Christian religion. One of Europe’s 60 regional and minority languages, Gagauz belongs to the Oghuz, south-western branch of the Turkic language family, together with Turkish, Azerbaijani and Turkmen. Spoken by 140,000 people in Moldova, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Greece and other countries, Gagauz – in addition to Romanian and Russian – is the official language of Gagauzia, an autonomous region of the Republic of Moldova. Gagauz was mainly a spoken rather than written language until the mid-20th century. The orthographic changes from Greek letters to Cyrillic under Soviet governance and from Cyrillic to Latin after gaining independence imply profound political and cultural changes. Re-connecting with the Gagauz numerals and number system may perhaps be part of the efforts to construct a new identity.
Personal communication with Todur Zanet (May 2018) and Vitalie Sirf of the Moldovan Academy of Sciences (Aug 2018) reveals that the Gagauz numerals are not used any more, except in rare publications by leaders in cultural revitalisation. Gagauzians today use the Latin (Roman) script and Roman and Arabic numerals. Sirf adds that Gagauzians, both in Bessarabia and the Balkans, have been using Arabic and Roman numerals since the end of the 19th century.
The same set of Gagauz numerals Zanet brings to our attention (p. 9) were already published almost a century ago by Atanas I. Manov, a Bulgarian linguist. Manov’s brief account includes a statement that adds to the significance of these numerals, namely, the Gagauz men and women who used these numerals were illiterate.
Can numeracy precede literacy? The examples of other pastoralists, farmers, navigators and many other illiterate artisans who used complex calculations suggest an affirmative answer. Joseph Mazur, an American mathematician proposes that ‘mathematical writing predates literature by more than a thousand years.’ One can be illiterate and mathematically literate. This may sound counter-intuitive in our age of computers when literacy is more valued than numeracy and large portions of our population suffer under an alarmingly low level of numeracy.
Cover of Atanas I. Manov, Potekloto na gagauzitiei tiekhnitie obichai i nravi (Varna, 1938) YA.2002.a.20996
The Gagauz numerals in Bulgarian, from Potekloto na gagauzitiei tiekhnitie obichai i nravi
Gagauz numerals are written using four basic symbols (vertical stroke, cross, half-circle, full circle) and their superimposition (vertical stroke in a circle, cross in a circle). The six icons are easy to notch with a few strokes or made as impressions by simple tools, characteristics they share with others number symbols, which Karl Menninger has labelled ‘folk’ and ‘peasant’ numerals.
The symbol for hundred represents the highest value carried by an individual icon. This may suggest a base 10 (decimal) thinking, however, the Gagauz number system seems to combine decimal and vigesimal (base 20) elements. Base 10 is used up to 19 and base 20 from 20, similar to what Georges Ifrah found in Danish, Celtic (Breton, Welsh, Irish) languages, Basque and Georgian. The French for eighty, quatre-vingts, which literally means ‘four twenties’ is also a vestige of base 20 thinking.
Gagauz numerals are read from left to right and formed in three ways: (i) adding, (ii) multiplying adjacent symbols or (iii) combining addition and multiplication. For instance, addition is applied up to 499; multiplication for 500 and 1,000, and their combination for 600 and above. No sign but the relative values of adjacent numerals indicate the algorithm change from addition to multiplication and combination: if a lower value numeral precedes the next, the lower is interpreted as a multiplier. The algorithm change from addition to multiplication marked by sequence exists also in other number systems, for instance Ge’ez, the ancient Ethiopian, and ancient and current Chinese.
Examples of Gagauz numerals formed by addition, multiplication and their combination
Let’s convert some Gagauz, Roman and Arabic numerals and experience the joys of learning a new numeric language (the key is at the end of the post).
Quiz to convert Gagauz, Roman and Arabic numerals
Converting one system to another raises awareness of the challenges people faced when trying to translate between different ways of counting. These transactions may have facilitated processes in which local numerals and number systems got lost in translation, and more widely shared systems for commercial, administrative and scientific communication were adopted.
According to the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger all four Gagauz dialects are endangered, without any reference to their numerals. The Gagauz number system may be extinct, yet it is an important part of the world’s cultural heritage, even if not listed in the UNESCO list of Intangible Heritage , because it highlights the diversity of knowing the world, well, more precisely, the diversity of reckoning. Losing local number systems, just like losing alphabetic languages and local knowledge sensu lato, is a stark reminder of losing important perspectives we could have on the world.
Andrea Deri, Cataloguer
Key to quiz: converting Gagauz, Roman and Arabic numerals
Acknowledgements
Contributions to this post from Todur Zanet, Vitalie Sirf (Moldovan Academy of Sciences) and Rossitza Atanassova, Saqib Baburi, Anna Chelidze, Bob Chen, Sara Chiesura, Eyob Derillo, Michael Erdman, Bink Hallum, Arani Ilankuberan, Marja Kingma and Geoff West (British Library) are much appreciated.
References/Further reading:
Florian Cajori, A History of Mathematical Notations (New York, 1993) YK.1996.a.5633
Tobias Dantzig, Number, the Language of Science (New York, 2005) YK.2006.a.18415
Georges Ifrah, The Universal History of Numbers. Volume 1. The World’s First Number-Systems. Volume 2. The Modern Number-System (London, 2000) YC.2001.a.17568
Georges Ifrah, From One to Zero: a Universal History of Numbers (New York, 1985) 85/33662
Elizaveta N. Kvilinkova, ‘The Gagauz Language through the Prism of Gagauz Ethnic Identity’. Anthropology & Archeology of Eurasia. Volume 52: Number 1(2013), pp. 74-94. 1546.502670
Joseph Mazur, Enlightening Symbols: a Short History of Mathematical Notation and Its Hidden Powers (Princeton and Oxford, 2014) YC.2014.a.5849
Karl Menninger, Number Words and Number Symbols: a Cultural History of Numbers (Cambridge, Mass., and London, England, 1970) qAL69/5025
Joseph Needham with the collaboration of Wang Ling, Science and civilisation in China. Vol. 3, Mathematics and the sciences of the heavens and the earth. (Cambridge, 1959) OIK 509.51
Magdalena Pasikowska-Schnass, Regional and Minority Languages in the European Union (Brussels, 2016)
James A. Picton, On the Origin and History of the Numerals. A Paper Held before the Literary and Philosophical Society of Liverpool, November 30, 1874. ([Liverpool, 1874]) 8531.dd.28.(1)
Edward Sapir, Language: an Introduction to the Study of Speech. (London, 1921) 012902.f.44.
Thomas Zitelmann, ‘Numbers, Numerals, Numeric Systems’ in Encyclopaedia Aethiopica. (Wiesbaden, 2007) OID 963.003
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