The description of the spelling system of the Service Book Sof. 519

Korotkova D. A., Molkov G. A. Grafiko-orfograficheskiye osobennosti drevnerusskogo sluzhebnika xiii veka (SOF. 519). Acta Linguistica Petropolitana. 911.

The article describes the Old Russian manuscript of the middle of XIIIth century with Novgorod phonetic features, whose spelling distinguishes it against other monuments of church literature of the period. A debatable feature of the language of Sof. 519, a frequent exchange of the letters ъ, ь, e, o, ѣ, is explored on the base of precise quantitative data and interpreted as an originally unified phenomenon provoked by the combination of standard and common spelling systems. Dimensions of the use of ordinary spelling system in the manuscript are the greatest among the described materials of Old Russian manuscripts.Other most interesting spelling features of the manuscript are also described. It allows to show the compatibility of ordinary and literal writings in one codex. It turns out that the features of ordinary spelling combines in Sof. 519 with conservatism on certain parts of its orthography. The main scribe consistently uses the South Slavic variant of the *tert-reflex in roots and also writes the jer-letters in positions of the fallen reduced vowels. The omission of the jer-letters in Sof. 519 occurs mainly in those positions where the oldest East Slavic orthographic norm accepted it. So the copyist of Sof. 519 can not be suspected of illiteracy; a significant distance between the spelling of the manuscript and the spelling of ordinary texts shows that the usage of ordinary writing’s techniques is conscious, has certain limits and is used in conjunction with the standard principle of etymological record.The separate part of the article is dedicated to the problem of the pronunciation of the letter ѣ in the scribes’ dialect. According to the conjencture of V. Kolesov the manuscript’s writing reflects pronunciation of the phoneme [ѣ] in place of [ь] in the Old Novgorod dialect. Our observations don’t confirm it. The exchange ь > ѣ often takes place when ь stays in the weak position; taking into consideration the presence of the opposite exchange in Sof. 519 (ѣ > ь) we can assert that this phenomenon has a pure graphic nature and can be united with other facts of the ordinary writing in the manuscript.