Plomin tablet

Plomin tablet (Croatian: Plominski natpis) is a Glagolitic inscription in Croatian at the outer wall of the church of Saint George in Plomin, modern-day Croatia. Roman god of flora and fauna Silvanus is portrayed. This inscription bears witness of early parallelism of two cultural currents on Istrian territory: Romance symbol is an Antique relief, and Slavic, i.e. Croatian symbol is the Croatian language and Glagolitic script.

Above the male figure a two-lined Glagolitic text is inscribed while on the right of the figure another symbol is carved whose meaning is not definitely ascertained. Reading of the text is fairly straightforward: the first line says SE EPIS, and the second line ЪLЪS. The sign whose function is questioned by Fučić has been inscribed with significantly deeper furrows and is four times larger than the average size of Glagolitic letters, and for that reason alone one can ask whether it's an indispensable ingredient of the Glagolitic inscription itself, has it been written by the hand of the same scribe and has it been inscribed at the same times as other text. A Glagolitic letter cannot be discerned from it for certainty.

Trying to read both of the lines continuously: SE E PISЪLЪ S.., i.e. this was written S..., the sentence remains unfinished. Whether the text was written by somebody whose name starts with S or somebody wrote something that starts with S is not known. Since Old Croatian verb pisati meant both "to write" and "to paint", it is uncertain whether this verb was used to denote also a sculptural work and concordantly, if Plomin tablet inscription is a signature of the sculptor, or the Glagolitic text some secondarily written graffiti, written by some scribe.

Reading of the text introduces some additional phonetic and orthographic difficulties — an unusual orthography appears for writing the participle pisalъ, where on the position of sound /a/ a semivowel 'ъ' is written (thus pisъlъ instead of pisalъ). Fučić argues whether it is phonetically possible for the author of this inscription to have mistaken the phonetic value of a semivowel with that of the full vowel /a/, i.e. that he might have replaced the signs due to the similarity of pronunciation.

General paleographic analysis shows that the rounded Glagolitic is still used, preceding the development of Croatian angular Glagolitic, which dates the monument before the 12-13th century.

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