УНИВЕРЗИТЕТ „СВ. КИРИЛ И МЕТОДИЈ“ – СКОПЈЕ

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The basic problem when writing in a Slavic language with a non-Slavic
alphabet is the limitation of the writing system for the sound system of the target
language. The Cyrillic alphabet is, of course, based on the Greek alphabet, but
in Modern Greek, the phonetic values of some of the consonantal graphemes
are different from the phonetic values that the graphemes were chosen to denote
in Slavic. From the Slavic point of view, the Greek alphabet lacks graphemes
for hushing sounds and, naturally, for the affricates they help constitute.
The vowels are characterized by a different complex of problems. All
South Slavic vowels have their equivalent in the Greek alphabet, excluding the
central vowel [ə]. As it is not difficult to find ways to correlate the different
Slavic vowels with Greek letters, it is the abundance of possible graphemes that
poses problems. For example, the monophthongization in Greek has produced
almost ten different ways of denoting the sounds [i] and [e], and it is therefore
important to examine whether or not those various graphemes or digraphs are
used to express actual phonetic differences in the target language.
The Macedonian text is accented throughout, as is the Greek text. The
acute accent and the circumflex are used to denote the word stress (Nuorluoto
2006). Furthermore, the spiritus lenis and spiritus asper are written on an initial
vowel, following the Greek tradition. They do not, however, carry any information.
There are two main sources for the graphemic solutions in the text. The
first one is, of course, the Greek writing system, which functions as the primary
stock for the graphemes, diacritics, and punctuation marks. The second is the
Church Slavonic writing tradition, whose influence is more marginal, but for
which there is still clear evidence.
2. Preliminaries
According to a preliminary interpretation of the text, the manuscript
represents the Lower Vardar dialect of Macedonian (see e.g. Nuorluoto
2006). Therefore, the phoneme inventory of the Lower Vardar dialect will
serve as the phonological hypothesis for the study of the graphemics of the
Konikovo Gospel. The Lower Vardar phoneme inventory differs from that of
the Macedonian standard language by the reflex of the back nasal *ǫ being /ă/,
and by the reflexes of the syllabic *l̥ and *r̥ being /lă/ or /ăl/, and /ră/ or /ăr/.
Furthermore, the non-stressed vowels are reduced accordingly: /o/ > /u/, /e/ >
/i/ and /a/ > /ă/. Another important factor is that there is a mobile stress at the
word level (Markovik’ 2001: 23-24).
The relationship between the hypothetical phoneme inventory and the
Greek alphabet used to depict it is problematic for two reasons. On the one
hand, many phonemes have no direct equivalent in the Greek alphabet. On the
other hand, the Greek writing system includes a great amount of redundancy