УНИВЕРЗИТЕТ „СВ. КИРИЛ И МЕТОДИЈ“ – СКОПЈЕ

4. Conclusion
161
It must still be emphasized that the phoneme inventory used here as the
starting point of the description of the graphemics of the Konikovo Gospel
is only hypothetical by its nature. The study of graphemics necessarily goes
hand-in-hand with the study of phonology and other fields. All of these fields
of research should provide each other with hypotheses to be scrutinized. From
the perspective of the study of graphemics, the preliminary hypothesis of the
phoneme inventory does not contradict the graphemic reality of the text and
thus seems valid for the purposes of future research.
On the whole, the basis of the writing system of the Konikovo Gospel
is clearly a phonetic one. Only the homographic phoneme pairs /a/-/ă/, /c/-/dz/
and /č/-/dž/ differ from this principle. Even though there is a fair number of
writing errors and rather extensive variation between the different solutions,
as one word can appear in many different forms even on same page, the basic
principles of the writing system are clearly distinguishable.
There still remain, however, questions that need to be answered. One
of these is the extent of the reduction /e/ > /i/. It might be worthwhile to study
the possibility that the non-stressed /e/ is mainly preserved in positions where
it carries morphological information, which is the case in some Macedonian
dialects (Lindstedt, personal communication).
One of the challenges for the future study of the graphemics in the
Konikovo Gospel is the more thorough analysis of the Greek graphotactics.
This point of view might shed new light on the problem concerning the accentuation.
Moreover, the distribution of the different ways of expressing the
palatal and palato-alveolar phonemes must be addressed, and, more precisely,
the question of whether there is some kind of development towards a more unified
norm in the course of the text. Furthermore, the study of the hypotheses
involving the relationship between the phonology and the graphemics of the
manuscript will benefit from a more extensive use of some of the basic tools
of computational linguistics.