УНИВЕРЗИТЕТ „СВ. КИРИЛ И МЕТОДИЈ“ – СКОПЈЕ

Max Wahlström
ON THE GRAPHEMICS OF THE KONIKOVO GOSPEL
1. Introduction
The Konikovo Gospel (call number Bibl.Patr.Alex.268 in the Library
of the Patriarchate of Alexandria) is a Sunday Gospel that comprises a Greek
source text, most likely copied from a vernacular translation of the Bible from
1710 (Leiwo 2007), and a translation into Macedonian. The main features of the
Macedonian side of the manuscript represent the Lower Vardar dialect that is
spoken in the current Greek Republic. This manuscript by an unknown author,
found in 2003, can be estimated to be approximately 200 years old (Lindstedt
2006: 243). Moreover, the manuscript has, in addition to the original text, another
stratum, namely, some corrections to the Macedonian text that reflect
the different lexical and dialectological preferences of a second writer. This
“second hand”, in light of what we now know, is Pavel Božigropski (Lindstedt
2006: 237).
In this article, I will analyze the graphemics of the Macedonian side of
the manuscript. I will attempt to describe the writing system that the author of
the Konikovo Gospel uses in the Macedonian part of the manuscript. This will
be done by assuming a hypothetical phoneme inventory of the language that
the author has targeted, and by then comparing that hypothetical inventory to
the graphemes and other graphemic signs in the text.
The most central starting point for the study of the writing system of
the Konikovo Gospel is that the entire manuscript is written in Greek letters.
While this manuscript is not the only Slavic text that makes use of the Greek
alphabet 1 , considering the lack of a standardized and broad tradition, some of
its graphemic solutions are most likely unique.
1
See e.g. Mazon, André & Vaillant, André. 1938. L’Évangéliaire de Kulakia. Un parler slave du Bas-Vardar.
Paris: Librairie Droz ; Ničev, Aleksandăr. 1977. “Četiriezičnijat rečnik” na Daniil. Godišnik na Sofijskija
universitet, Fakultet po zapadni filologii, Tom. LXX 2. Sofia: Universitetska pečatnica ; Georgievski,
Kuzman. 2003. Trijazičnikot na Petre Kavajof (Prilog kon geneologijata na struškata familija Kavaevci).
Skopje: Menora.