УНИВЕРЗИТЕТ „СВ. КИРИЛ И МЕТОДИЈ“ – СКОПЈЕ

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from the perspective of Slavic languages. For instance, the word măčíhte, written
ματζε̮ίχτε, reflects both the shortcomings and the redundant features of the
Greek writing system. For instance, there is no way of denoting the vowel /ă/
and the affricate /č/ in the Greek alphabet. As a consequence, to denote the palato-alveolar
nature of the affricate, the author uses the grapheme in expressing
/ă/ and the graphemes τ and ζ together with a ‘palatal arc’ under the
next vowel. But then again, the redundant features of the Greek alphabet are
also evident in the example: in regard to the Modern Greek pronunciation, to
express the phoneme /i/, the writer has five alternative vowels or ancient diphthongs.
All five of these graphemes or digraphs occur in the Konikovo Gospel
and are used to express /i/ only.
To express word stress, the author employs the acute accent and the
circumflex, which are both used also in the Greek polytonic writing system.
These two diacritical marks are used in Modern Greek to express word stress,
but they do not carry any other phonetic information. However, in at least one
case in the Macedonian part of the Konikovo Gospel, the writer uses these
marks in a way that might have some phonological relevance (c.f. Chapter 2,
phoneme /ă/). Though the variation in the use of these two accents is mainly
redundant in regards to the Slavic phonology, it is nevertheless not random.
To a great extent, the Macedonian text also seems to follow the Greek orthography.
However, instead of speaking about orthography, it is wiser to use the
term “Greek graphotactics” when talking about the Macedonian part of the
manuscript, as the Greek orthography includes rules that are only applicable
in the context of Greek grammar.
The Church Slavonic influence on the Konikovo Gospel is most evident
in the use of the grapheme in the word νεδελ (nedel’a). 2 In addition, the
writer uses a ligature to conjoin the to the graphemes . Also, the
use of the graphemes and to represent the sounds [g] and [d] can be
seen as a Church Slavonic feature (Nuorluoto 2006).
3. The Writing System of the Konikovo Gospel
My aim here is to describe the writing system of the Konikovo Gospel
by presenting the graphemes that are used to depict each phoneme of the hypothetical
phoneme inventory. Some problems concerning vowel reduction will
also be discussed, and wider problems that involve more than one phoneme are
addressed when they first appear. Nevertheless, all Greek letter combinations
used in the manuscript will not be treated in this paper.
2
occurs only a few times, though, and only in the headings.
3
The grapheme combines actually with a superposed , representing the digraph with
the phonetic value [u].