УНИВЕРЗИТЕТ „СВ. КИРИЛ И МЕТОДИЈ“ – СКОПЈЕ

156
/a/ The phoneme /a/ is always written with the grapheme . In the
Lower Vardar dialect, the non-stressed /a/ reduces to /ă/. These two sounds are
not distinguished in the manuscript, which makes the study of this particular
reduction very difficult.
/ă/ This phoneme is always written with an , which is problematic as
it is homographic with the phoneme /a/. However, closer scrutiny of the supposed
minimal pair sam – săm (the former being a pronominal adjective, the
latter a verb) reveals that, in the beginning of the manuscript, the pronominal
adjective is written with an acute accent and the verb with a circumflex, perhaps
copying the accent of the Greek first person singular of the verb “to be”,
εἶμαι. Distinguishing between the homographic words in this manner could be
due to the influence of Church Slavonic, but again, in this particular case, the
Greek graphotactics probably explains the phenomenon. The verb săm appears
several times in the text before the pronominal adjective. When the pronominal
adjective occurs the first time, it is written in the plural σάμη. The Greek
graphotactics does not permit the circumflex to be written on the penultimate
syllable, if the last letter represents an etymologically long vowel, as η does.
Consequently, when the pronominal adjective appears the next two times in
the text in the singular, it has the acute accent.
Yet, further into the manuscript, the writer uses the circumflex both to
write the pronominal adjective and the verb. Paradoxically, in a passage where
the homography of these words might cause confusion, the writer uses the circumflex
for both words: Vidéjte rácite mi i nózite mi: óti sâm (pron. adj.) jáze
sâm 4 (verb). It is nonetheless understandable that the writer did not necessarily
feel the need to distinguish between these two phonemes in the writing, as the
only minimal pair in the text consists of a pronominal adjective and a verb,
which are fairly easy to discern from the context.
It is also likely that the writer has also used the grapheme in clitic
singular accusative personal pronouns (standard Macedonian ме, те, се) to express
the phoneme /ă/. These are almost always written as μά, τά, and σά.
/b/ This phoneme is almost always written with the digraph . Yet
in the verb zburúva, /b/ is most often written with a : ζπγργ΄βα. Perhaps a
sequence of three consonantal graphemes did not seem desirable. It is evident
that the writer has pursued a progressive assimilation, common in the Greek
language, as the nasal – stop sequences demonstrate.
/v/ This phoneme is written with a . It is also represented by the historical
diphthongs , as in the word Εύάγγελιε. There is much variation
between /v/ and the voiceless allophone [f]. For example, in the beginning of
the text, the author writes cárstfutu, but later the word occurs only in the form
cárstvutu. When it comes to this allophony, the writing system of the Konikovo
Gospel is mainly phonetic.
4
Bibl.Patr.Alex.268: 35