УНИВЕРЗИТЕТ „СВ. КИРИЛ И МЕТОДИЈ“ – СКОПЈЕ

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centuation in the Greek orthography is also used to denote word stress; however,
the accent cannot be written further than on the antepenultimate syllable. It is
possible that in the target language of the Konikovo Gospel, there are words
that actually have a stress that falls further from the end of the word than on
the antepenultimate syllable.
All in all, the writer follows fairly dutifully the Greek graphotactics in
the deployment of the acute accent and the circumflex. Still, the accent is sometimes
written further from the end of the word than the Greek graphotactics
would permit. One interesting example is the word mágaricata. The accent in
this word is written on the fifth syllable from the end of the word. A few pages
later, the same word occurs again, but here it is written as magarícata. In the
latter case, the place of the accent is in concord with the Greek graphotactics.
Another example of the problems of accentuation is the recurrent phrase
Učenícité mu. The question is whether the accentuation here represents the
actual stresses of the target language or merely the influence of the Greek graphotactics.
The Greek orthography does have a rule such that when a clitic pronoun
follows the headword that has an accent on the antepenultimate syllable,
a secondary accent is written on the ultimate syllable of the headword.
Moreover, many of the prepositions are accented in the text. For instance,
the following prepositions are regularly written with an accent: sôs, ná and zá.
In theory, this could be explained by the fact that the preposition sometimes can
belong to a “phonetic word” together with the main word and can be stressed
in speech. Nevertheless, it is more likely that the accentuation of monosyllabic
clitics in general does not reflect the stress of the words, but, again, the spirit
of the Greek writing system.
As it is clear from these aforementioned observations, it is not reasonable
to assume that all of the accents actually represent the word stress of the target
language, even if, for the most part, that were the case. Most of the variation and
vacillation occurs in words that have either one or more than three syllables.
3.3. The Second Hand
A large part of the corrections made to the text by the second hand consists
of “restoring” the reduced vowels to their unreduced forms. This involves
the reductions /o/ > /u/ and /e/ > /i/. One of the most typical corrections is
changing the verb béši into béše. At times, the second hand also replaces whole
words. The graphemic principles of the second hand are most visible in these
instances. As a general rule, these principles are similar to those of the first
hand; however, the second hand does not write accents as regularly.