Omission of the Jer Vowels in Early East Slavic Manuscripts Author(s): Charles E. Gribble Source: Russian Linguistics, Vol.

13, No. 1 (1989), pp. 1-14 Published by: Springer Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40160216 . Accessed: 21/01/2011 13:19
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CHARLES E. GRIBBLE

OMISSION OF THE JER VOWELS IN EARLY EAST SLAVIC MANUSCRIPTS

While most surviving manuscripts of Old Church Slavonic reflect a time in which the process known as the "loss of the jers" or "jer shift" was well ! under way, if not complete, East Slavic presents a quite different picture. The overwhelming majority of both weak and strong jers are written "correctly" in manuscripts from all parts of Rus' until at least the middle of the twelfth century. We can thus observe and presumably describe the loss of the weak jers in East Slavic. In spite of an apparent abundance of material, we find a wide variety of opinions among scholars as to the exact timing and nature of the process, with some claiming that certain or all weak jers have already been lost by the time of the earliest documents, and others asserting that the loss of the jers begins only much later. There is also a dispute as to whether the jers were lost earlier in some positions than in others. Since an enormous amount has been written about the loss of the jers and about their use in manuscripts of the earliest period, it would take an entire book to analyze the existing literature in detail. Fortunately or unfortunately, much of what has been printed is either merely a repetition of views put forth by other scholars or is a detailed enumeration of minutiae which are ultimately of little or no use. Our purposes will be served quite adequately by a survey of the analyses in some of the major works on the history of Russian. It will be seen that they are frequently mutually contradictory, do not explain certain observed regularities in the spellings of the manuscripts, nor do they correspond to any system which can be regarded as satisfactory from a theoretical point of view. After summarizing these views and reexamining the written evidence, I shall propose a theory which explains most of the cases of omission of jers>both weak and strong, before the middle of the twelfth century, when in fact the loss of the jers did begin in the southwestern part of the East Slavic area. The question of when the weak jers were lost and whether they were all lost simultaneously is made less clear by the unspoken assumption of most scholars: that what is written reflects the phonetic reality. Thus, when a jer letter is omitted, that means that the jer was not pronounced, that it had been "lost". Such an assumption is an easy one, and the tendency to accept it without question was strengthened by the fact that for a long time all of the scholars working on early East Slavic were not primarily linguists, but rather philologists, for whom written materials were the focus of interest
Russian Linguistics 13 (1989), 1-14. 1989 by Kluwer Academic Publishers.

CHARLES E. GRIBBLE

and the major source of data. For these scholars the testimony of the manuscripts was nearly unimpeachable, and they often seem to have some of the reverence for the "received word" of the manuscripts that the copyists displayed toward the contents of those manuscripts. Later certain scholars, beginning with Durnovo, developed a less simplistic and more accurate theory. Durnovo 1933, his last published article, contains the definitive statement of his views. The main proponent of this approach at present is Lunt, who points out (1987, 140) that "... there may not be a oneto-one correlation between letter and phoneme, and that certainly there is no direct relationship between phonetics and orthographic symbols." Although recent Soviet handbooks on the history of Russian do not seem to adopt Lunt's methods (see below for a sampling), their importance has been recognized inter alia by Zivov (1987, 65), who names five major investigators of the formation of the early East Slavic literary language: Sobolevski, Jagic, Saxmatov, Durnovo, and Lunt. One of the greatest writers on the history of Russian was Sobolevskij, whose remain an invaluable reference even today. He cites (1907, the forms , etc. from early manuscripts, 46) , , /, as well as a form from Constantine Porphyrogenitus (veaarjz), and concludes that " , , XI , ( ) , ( ) His unspoken ." assumption is, to repeat, that the spelling reflected the phonetics. Saxmatov (1915, 200-86) goes into the question in great detail, and he examines a number of factors, such as the influence of the pronunciation of the Bulgarians who came to Russia as teachers in the late 10th and early 11th centuries. After establishing that the jers were normally part of the speech of Russians until the middle of the 12th century, he goes on to consider the cases of omission of jers in certain positions, giving the standard examples (but omitting the material from Constantine Porphyrogenitus). His conclusion is: ", , . , (1915, then goes on to attempt a phonetic explanation for this, but 218)". according to Kuznecov (see below), it contradicts everything that we know about Russian accent. He notes that OCS documents show some similar phenomena, where the jers are left out in initial syllables, and then goes on to state (1915, 218-19) that the loss of the jers in the initial syllable was followed by their loss in medial syllables, and states that instead of etc. gave rise to instead of , (with the standard

OMISSION OF THE JER VOWELS

- examples again). " , , , His explanation thus takes us from jers in an initial syllable ." before a stressed vowel in the following syllable, to jers in the same words in medial position, then to all jers in non-final position, then to final jers. Durnovo (1924, 156) states that " , , , , , , , XI . XI XII ., "" "" , ; , , , , , , , , . "" "" It ." ., should be noted that this list contains the same words cited most frequenomittly by other scholars. Durnovo also notes that the jers are "" ted in the first syllable following a prefix (e.g., , ). Bulaxovski (1958, 83-4) rejects Saxmatov's scheme, and says that one must agree with Falev (1927, 120) that " , ) ( " , ( " , ) , , , "", "" , . . , , "" .. ... , , , , ; ". Kuznecov (1963, 97-100) treats the question more carefully and with somewhat more sophistication. He does state that " , , , , ." , , then gives some of the standard examples, such as /, , After noting Saxmatov's contention that the jers were first lost in the etc. initial syllable of the word immediately before the stressed syllable, he rejects it by pointing out that while most cases of "loss" do occur under these circumstances, to assume that the first pretonic syllable was the weakest and therefore most prone to vowel loss contradicts the situation observed in the modern literary language and many dialects with both okanie

CHARLES E. GRIBBLE

and akanie, where the first pretonic syllable is the strongest of the unstressed syllables, rather than the weakest.2 He then supports the view of Falev (whose thesis was first expressed in a more condensed form by Fortuna, tov), and states that ", , then asserts that in cases where ." the jer also appears in strong position in other forms, it is not lost in weak as his only example for absence of loss, and position, and gives / notes that the examples of loss all involve words where the jer is always in weak position. Ivanov (1964, 178-79) combines all possibilities by stating that the loss of the jers occurred approximately in the second half of the twelfth century, but that it possibly occurred earlier, and then cites the standard etc. He supports Saxmatov's hypothesis of earliest loss in the /, , first syllable before stress, but mentions limiting it to those cases where the , jer never was in strong position. He then states that " , . , , , , ." no proof for this assertion of early loss in final position.3 gives Markov (1964) gives a very detailed summary (based primarily on analyses published by other scholars) of the use of the jer symbols in the various early manuscripts, but does not come to any very interesting conclusions, except that on page 39 (point 2) he notes that in the standard /, etc., the jer is dropped where the cluster examples, such as , did not exist previously in Slavic. This is an important observation. Kiparski (1979, 101-103) states that "Earliest of all we have the loss of isolated , , i.e. those in absolute final position, and those in the first syllable of a word, between two consonants, followed by a syllable containing a full vowel." No mention is made of the full vowel being stressed. He points out that while the soft sign showed the softness of a preceding consonant, the hard sign had no real function in most cases, but only in 1917 was it removed from final position. "This orthographical tradition had the effect of concealing the loss of , in the final position. Thus there have been scholars who have considered the disappearance of these sounds in the first syllable (where it could be perceived from the spelling) to be the earlier... Actually the opposite is the case, as can be seen quite easily from the names of the Dnieper rapids." He then quotes the well-known examples, although he is forced to admit that two of his four examples

OMISSION OF THE JER VOWELS

contain elements that are clearly South Slavic, rather than Russian, raising the old question of precisely how and from whom Constantine Porphyrogenitus got his information. He also does not consider at all the questions relating to how a Greek speaker of the time might have perceived some of the Slavic sounds (in particular, the nasal vowels, if still present). While in this article we cannot go into the very complicated questions raised by the material in Constantine Porphyrogenitus' work, those questions remain, and in the absence of other evidence (Finnic shows the final vowels still present at the time the words were borrowed), basing one's conclusions about the phonology of tenth-century East Slavic on the Greek spellings seems quite unjustified. Gorskova and Xaburgajev (1981, 66-7) state that the beginning of the process of the loss of the jers "..., , , X-XI ., , , ... ." : , /, , , Toth (1985, 206-68) has a long and detailed analysis of jer spellings in ten early, but short, East Slavic manuscripts, but never draws any conclusions relevant to this article. The study is also flawed by the fact that the total amount of material is quite small and many of the manuscripts are not typical for early East Slavic (e.g., four of the ten are one-jer manuscripts, which is apparently the sole surviving including the , East Slavic manuscript that uses only the hard jer). Vlasto (1986, 50-2) refutes the alleged Greek evidence. He points out that "the transcriptions of Russian toponyms in De administrandoimperio (1.21; mid 10th c.) suggest that the jers were intact at that time..." He cites examples from non-final position and then the examples veaorjxand -. "The Emperor received these words at second hand or worse. It is certain that there were Bulgarian interpreters in the imperial chancellery and is clearly in Big. (OCS) form, not ESI. Greek, however, does not admit final / or x: therefore the words were presented to him as having these final consonants. A Bulgarian might well so pronounce as early as 950 since weak jers began to fall out in his vernacular earlier than in ESI. These transcriptions are thus not the best evidence for the precocious lapse of final jers in ESI. As final jers were scrupulously maintained in writing, ESI. texts give no direct pointer to the time when they ceased to form a syllable." etc. are then treated by Vlasto, who The standard examples of notes that these are all pre tonic (emphasis his - EG) jers, and that other isolated jers are still present. He then asserts that "... this strongly suggests

CHARLES E. GRIBBLE

that pretonic jers were the weakest type of internal jer." He notes that "All of the above pretonic jers, for example, could easily be dropped in speech since they were not supported by any morphological pattern and also led to no new consonant groups of insuperable difficulty." This of course undermines his argument that the pretonic jers were dropped first because they were weaker, since the posttonic jers were almost without exception supported by other forms in which they were strong (e.g., his examples of and both show suffixes in which the jers occurred in as well as in weak). strong position To summarize the material considered above, we may state the following. 1) From the earliest texts onward, the jers are frequently omitted in the first root syllable of certain words;4 2) There is no reason to believe that the jers were lost in final position earlier than elsewhere. 3) Kuznecov points out that we cannot reasonably ascribe the omission of the jers in the first root syllable to that syllable's being "weaker" than other unstressed syllables, although his reasoning proceeds from the state of affairs in the modern language. Since East Slavic before the loss of the jers was presumably a tone language, without strong difference in stress between syllables marked by tone and those not so marked, there is no reason to assume that the syllable before the one with the tone was weaker than other syllables without the tone. A major advance is made by the views expressed in Lunt 1950. Although this dissertation unfortunately has never been formally published, its availability through University Microfilms has made its important material fairly widely known. Lunt spends less time on the question of the writing of the weak jers than one might expect, presumably because of the existence of detailed material in Durnovo 1925, but he does touch upon it three times. The first time is on page 18 in connection with the orthography of the Old Church Slavonic Codex Marianus:
"The omission of the weak jers is regular, using the quantitative measure as a norm, only in the words "kto" 'who'... "cto" 'what?'... "psi" 'dogs' (and other forms of this root)... "ptica" 'bird'... and "niktoze" 'no one'. Almost all of these words are frequently occurring items which must often have appeared as allegro-forms. Moreover, the omission of the vowel could not possibly have caused any confusion, since the consonant groups kt, ct, ps, or pt were not found in any words, and the difference between kbto and kto was probably for a long period of time a matter of the speed of speech and the style... There were not yet, apparently, any syllables in the Church Slavic language which could end in a consonant, so that the groups mentioned would automatically be interpreted as '/c+ vowel + /', etc., from the phonemic point of view."

As far as I can tell, Lunt was the first to notice the crucial point about the consonant clusters not occurring otherwise (his statement about Old

OMISSION OF THE JER VOWELS

Church Slavonic holds equally for early East Slavic). His mention of allegro forms does not seem to hold up well under examination, however. would be more likely to have alleThere is no reason why pbs- and We will also forms than any other nouns, such as osblb or sblb or . gro see below that many of the words which have omitted jers in the East Slavic manuscripts are ones for which any allegro form is very unlikely; moreover, some of them were South Slavic elements, for which an allegro form must be regarded as essentially impossible. The second time is on page 70. While discussing the orthography of the first part of the ArxangeVskoe Evangelie he notes that the final of a verbal ending is dropped four times before c/k, "... but in every case the line in which the omission occurs is written closely together. It seems probable that the omission of the 'V was partly a space-saving device. There are no other cases of final omission of jers... The root "n>p(b)t-"'murmur' happens to be attested only twice, and both times the second "" is missing." His other examples belong in the list given below after consideration of Durnovo's materials. It should be noted that while there is no reason to consider any of these six cases an allegro form, they do all belong to the category of consonant clusters which did not occur. One word which might which Lunt says "occasionally" has the jer have an allegro form is , omitted. In this case, although the consonant cluster /zd/ does occur in early East Slavic, the cluster of letters cd does not, and it would surely have had an unusual visual appearance to a scribe, putting it in the same category as the other examples with "non-existent" consonant clusters. On page 87, in discussing the orthography of the second part of the ArxangeVskoe Evangelie, Lunt remarks that "The use of the jer symbols seems dependent on the SSI protograph of AE2 to about the same extent it was in OE, and therefore far greater than in the case of AE1." He does cite a larger number of items where a weak jer is omitted, but remarks that "... in all instances there are parallels in either Sav or Supr, if not in the other classical texts, so that we have no reason to assume that any example is indicative of anything special in Micko's treatment." The exceptions that he cites are all items that Durnovo (1925) lists in his detailed treatment of individual manuscripts. The general picture of my conclusions below is not affected by either Lunt's or Durnovo's list of details. At this point it is appropriate to turn to Durnovo's study of the letters and in early East Slavic texts (1925, 95-117). Durnovo used twenty manuscripts, mostly of substantial size, from the 11th and 12th centuries. Several had more than one scribe, so we have a quite broad sampling of orthographical habits. The manuscripts of course vary in their degree of literacy, faithfulness to East Slavic vs. South Slavic orthographical norms,

CHARLES E. GRIBBLE

etc., but a summary of Durnovo's work gives a good picture of the cases of the omission of and in early East Slavic manuscripts. Omissions can be conveniently grouped into three categories: 1) root syllables, 2) prefixes, and 3) suffixes and desinences. Roots normally omit the jer only in the initial syllable. The manuscripts vary from almost no omissions in any forms (e.g., the second [main] scribe of the Ostromir Gospel) to constant or almost constant omission in certain words (e.g., the The lexical items in which jers are omitted ). with some frequency in more than one manuscript are the following: , ()-/()-, ('all' [it is much less commonly omitted in the meaning of 'village'; for example in the Mstislav Gospel it is omitted in the majority of occurrences of the root for 'all,' but almost always preserved in 'village']), -/\-, -, , , -, ()-, is never omitted in many manuscripts), -, , -, (the , (immediately followed by ), -1-, /-//-, and ), (including -/-, ('think'), h, -, /, -, (//)-, -/-/-, , , -, , -, ('count, read, honor'), ,5 Certain of these forms can be discarded from further consideration. The forms ()-/()are South Slavic, and the insertion of a non-etymowas merely the East Slavic scribes' way of trying to cope with logical jer what was, from their point of view, an impossible cluster. Since Durnovo and since the gives no information about what followed the prefix ()-, jer at the end of this prefix shows up inconsistently from the very earliest texts (presumably due to the early workings of analogy), we must also exclude it from consideration. The form is a South Slavic form, not an East Slavic form (Lunt 1987, 145). Some of the others, such as , are probably also not East Slavic. While a majority of the remaining forms had the stress on the syllable following the jer which can be omitted, there are some which presumably did not (such as , %, , -/-/-, and certain forms of some of the other stems, e.g., , -, most of the forms of -, and probably some other items as , well). It is thus clear that we cannot talk about the loss being confined to instances where the jer is immediately before a stressed vowel. The argument that the jers dropped are always weak and never in strong position is undermined by two forms which occur quite frequently and in a variety of manuscripts: 'all' and 'day' (nom. masc. sg. in both inIn both of these cases the jer is strong. It is also interesting that stances). forms *, * do not seem to occur. While it is true that the *,

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former two forms have a front jer in the root and the latter have a back jer, there does not seem to be any plausible explanation based upon that difference. The argument made by some scholars that jers which were never in strong position, and therefore not subject to support by analogy, were pronounced more weakly than those jers which were supported by analogy simply is not tenable from a theoretical point of view. One might well argue that the spelling of jers which had analogical support was maintained better, and it is almost certainly the case that prefixes, suffixes, and desinences could be learned as graphic units, since there were relatively few of them, but there is no reason to claim a difference in pronunciation. Moreover, there were other jers which were never in strong position, such but which very seldom as those in the verb stems , , , had the jer omitted (see Durnovo 1925). Since all of the explanations proposed to date do not explain the observed facts, such as the omission of jers in some words and not in others, the before the dropping of the jer in the preposition and , spellings but not before words beginning with consonants other than [t], etc., we must reject those explanations. I believe that the answer is rather to be found in an extension of Lunt's observation (1950, 18) about the situation in Marianus. The fact is that in every case where the jer is dropped in writing, the resulting consonant cluster was one that otherwise could not occur in early East Slavic.6 Whether the jer was spelled or not, it was present in the pronunciation. The omission of the jer was therefore phonologically irrelevant, since no confusion could arise. We very rarely find the jer omitted in the forms of the root 'send', for example,7 since the cluster existed in such words as . What factors might have led an 11th- or 12th-century scribe in Rus' to decide to omit certain letters? One is certainly the fact that some jers must have been missing in many of the South Slavic protographs that they copied from. In most cases, the East Slavic scribes "corrected" the South Slavic manuscripts as they copied, using both rules and their own speech as a guide (see Durnovo 1933 and Lunt 1950). In the case of such items the cluster [kt] was not opposed to a sequence [kbt] in the East as , scribes' speech, since the cluster [kt] did not exist at that time. Slavic Without a difference in pronunciation to guide the scribe, the graphic difference may have seemed less important to him, or perhaps not important at all. A second factor that would have allowed an East Slavic scribe to omit certain letters was that some words regularly omitted part of their letters.

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It is true that these words comprised a limited group, and moreover were normally written with a titlo, but it did not require much of a jump to extend the group of words slightly, and the titlo was not infrequently omitted even in the original group of words. One must note that most of the words with omitted jers are quite common, just like the words which were customarily written in shortened form and under a titlo (and at least one of them, -, was frequently written with a titlo, giving one more point of contact between the two groups of words). A third, probably much less important factor is that omitting the jer saved space, and thus conserved expensive parchment. An examination of manuscripts showed that the scribes clearly had a visual conception of much of what they wrote, and it was easy enough to give a "canonical" visual image to certain words and consonant clusters. It is this visual image, where made so frequent, that explains the In the same way, the established use of rather than before . visual image of ec- as the stem for 'all' and - as the stem for 'day', based upon the majority of forms where the stem jer was weak, explain why the scribes could write and as the nominative singular. A few notes on details should be added here. The first and most important is that individual manuscripts often show deviations from the general scheme that I have proposed, just as individual manuscripts show deviations from virtually all rules. So, for example, the Izbornik 1073 drops jers in more places than most other manuscripts; this is in general probably to be explained by the influence of the South Slavic protograph (for details, see Durnovo 1925, 99-100). It is striking that many of the deviations can be explained quite nicely by the rule that I have proposed. Thus, although in most manuscripts the in the suffix -- is not dropped at all or is dropped so rarely that it has to be regarded as a chance scribal error, in the Mineja 1097 it is dropped at least 70 times (Durnovo 1925, 107). Of these, more than two-thirds occur after p. All of Durnovo's examples show a full vowel before the p. The sequence full vowel + did not occur in early East Slavic (although jer+/w did), so once again we are dealing with a previously non-existent sequence. The other one-third all involve the consonants , , , , *, , before the , which means that all these clusters are, like , new ones. Durnovo notes: " , ." The fact that the sequence is carefully kept distinct from , because both of them could occur in early East Slavic, reinforces our conclusion. A very similar situation exists in the No. 330 (Durnovo 1925, 109). This listing could be extended considerably, but since it is a matter of details, rather than the principle,

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11

I will not do so. The reader is invited to consider the material in Durnovo 1925 in the light of my theory. Saxmatov (1915, 209) gives some interesting data from the Galician Gospel of 1144 and the ChristinopolitanGospel of the 12th century. In both of these a variety of jers are omitted in various words and positions, but in all cases they meet the criteria of creating previously non-existent clusters. Saxmatov asserts: ", , : , While he is right about the ." "purely graphic" character of the omission, I would maintain that it is not a matter of ignoring the living pronunciation, but just the opposite: the living pronunciation was a factor that was taken for granted, which meant that no confusion could arise from the omission. If Saxmatov were right about the scribes' ignoring their living pronunciation, why did they omit jers only in those cases where no minimal pairs existed? The examples given by Saxmatov are simply a logical extension of the type of dropping etc. in earlier manuswe have seen in such words as , , , cripts. A final and very interesting case worth exploring briefly is the Vygoleksinski Sbornik of the 12th century (published, with a short study, in Kotkov 1977). It is dated in both Kotkov 1977 and Smidt 1984 as being from the end of the 12th century, although on the basis of personal work with the manuscript, I agree with Lunt (1987, 143) in placing it at about the middle of the 12th century. The manuscript has two parts; the occupies folia 1 through 33r; folia 33v through 171 contain the This second Life was translated so badly that . it is virtually incomprehensible without a parallel Greek text, and is therefore of little use for linguistic analysis, since the scribe clearly often did not is quite clear and understand what he was copying.8 The material for analysis. provides excellent The first sixty-five pages (folia l-33r) present a manuscript which must be placed between the Galician Gospel of 1144, which does not show any real indication of the loss of the weak jers, and the Dobrilo Gospel of 1164, which shows not only lost weak jers, but e and from strong jers9. VS1 shows the "new jat\" which is generally accepted as being the result of compensatory lengthening before a weakened or lost jer, and it shows 21 cases of a vocalized strong jer. Of these 8 belong to the category of consonant +jer + liquid + consonant. Since the combinations -ep etc. plus consonant did not exist in early East Slavic, and there could be no contrast betthis spelling means little by itself. Of the remaining and , ween

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13 instances, all can easily be explained by morphological analogy or copying from the South Slavic protograph (for details, see Gribble 1967, 10-11). It is clear that the scribe must have still had the jers in his language, at least as an optional pronunciation, since there are a number of instances where an has been "corrected" to by the scribe. VS1 contains just about 100 instances of an omitted jer, or about three per page. In every case, the resulting cluster was one that did not previously exist in East Slavic. Thus, even when the weak jers were on the verge of being lost, and their pronunciation was perhaps only an optional style for the scribe, he kept the feeling that the letters could be omitted only in those instances where the omission would make no difference in pronunciation. The explanation advanced in this paper passes the tests which the other explanations fail. Clearly, it eliminates the contradictions in previous explanations. It also explains the observed regularities in spelling, and why certain roots drop the jers regularly or sporadically, while others never do. Finally, it eliminates the theoretical problems posed by phonetic or phonological explanations, since we are actually dealing with an orthographical device (based upon a phonological reality).

NOTES 1 This paper is essentially the one which I had announced for the Ninth International Congress of Slavists in Kiev in 1983; my abstract for it was printed, but because of the pressure of other commitments, the paper was not written at that time. 2 Avanesov and Orlova (1965, 66) point out that in some okan'je dialects the vowel of the second pretonic syllable may be longer than the vowel of the first pretonic, but they do not say anything about force. In any case, the examples from the early manuscripts are primarily cases where the jer occurs in the only syllable of the word before the tonic syllable, or else the omitted jer is posttonic. Moreover, since in the 1lth and early 12th centuries East Slavic almost certainly had tone, not stress, as the distinctive prosodic feature, we cannot assume any significant reduction of atonic syllables. In Ivanov 1968 he is concerned with other matters and does not consider the question of "missing" jers in the manuscripts, but simply states (p. 289) that the jers fell in the middle of the twelfth century. 4 They are also sometimes omitted in other syllables in a few words or morphemes such as and -. 5 The situation is in general very complicated, and I have normally excluded cases which occur only in one or two manuscripts unless they seem to have some special significance; there are a few cases where one or two instances of omission occur over the entire range of manusin the part of the Ostromir Gospel written by the second scribe, and cripts (such as in the Mineja 1096), which surely must be considered random scribal errors, and not an indication of anything in the language. I exclude South Slavic borrowings from consonant clusters which could occur in early East is not considered to be an East Slavic cluster. The only case which is not Slavic; thus -clear is the cluster -?./-, which may have occurred in East Slavic if the word is not a South Slavic form. The question of the etymology of this word is not settled. The cluster -erne- did occur in East Slavic, but not in initial position, so writing did not bring

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OF THE JER VOWELS

13

did. It should be noted that the jer in the prefix about ambiguity any more than writing - was not, with rare exceptions, left out in other verbs. 7 Of the twenty manuscripts and well over twenty different hands examined by Durnovo occurs without the jer only in three: the second hand of the Izbornik (1925), the root 1073, the second hand of the Arxangeiskoe Evangelie (both of which are strongly influenced by the South Slavic original: see Lunt 1950, 87 and 115) and the first hand of the Uspenskij Sbornik, which in general has more jer omissions than most manuscripts (see Durnovo 1925, 110). 8 For details, see Gribble 1967, 52-53. 9 There is reason to doubt the accuracy of dating the Dobrilo Gospel to 1164. First, the jump between the Galician Gospel of 1144 with no jer-shift and the DG, which is only twenty years later and shows the completed results of the jer-shift, is simply too much for such a short period. Further, if the VygoleksinskijSbornik, which is from the same area as the DG (both show the "new jat'," for example) is to be dated as the end of the 12th century, how can the DG be dated earlier, when it shows a much later stage of development? Although the question clearly needs more investigation, one must think about the possibility that the colophon to the DG was copied and that the actual manuscript is significantly later than 1164.

REFERENCES
Avanesov, R. I. and V. G. Orlova, eds.: 1965, , , Moskva, Nauka. Borkovski, V. I. and P. S. Kuznecov: 1963, , Moskva, Izdatel'stvo AN SSSR. Bulaxovski, L.A.: 1958, , , Kiev, Radjans'ka skola. , , Durnovo, Nikolaj: 1924, Moskva-Leningrad, Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo. (Reprint: Slavistic Printings and ReprintingsXXII, 's-Gravenhage, Mouton, 1962.) XI XII ., Durnovo, Nikolaj: 1925, ' V, 93-117. / .,' Slavia XII, 45-82. Durnovo, Nikolaj, 1933, ' Falev, I.: 1927, ' , , I, 111-22. II, . Gorskova, . V. and G. A. Xaburgajev: 1981, , Moskva, Vyssaja skola. Gribble, Charles E.: 1967, Linguistic Problems of the VygoleksinskiSbornik, Unpublished dissertation, Harvard University. Moskva, Prosvescenie. , Ivanov, V. V.: 1964, , Moskva, Prosvescenie. Ivanov, V. V.: 1968, Kiparski, Valentin: 1979, Russian Historical Grammar, volume 1. The Development oj the Sound System, Translated by J. I. Press, Ann Arbor, Ardis. Kotkov, S. I., ed.: 1977, Moskva, Nauka. , Kuznecov 1963: see Borkovskij and Kuznecov. The phonology section was written entirely by Kuznecov. Lunt, Horace G.: 1950, The Orthography of Eleventh-Century Russian Manuscripts, Ann Arbor, University Microfilms. Lunt, Horace G.: 1987, 'On the Relationship of Old Church Slavonic to the Written Language of Early Rus\ Russian Linguistics 11, 133-162. , Kazan', UniverMarkov, V. V.: 1964, sitetskoe izdatel'stvo. , Saxmatov, A. A.: 1915, {11), Petrograd, Tipografija imperatorskoj akademii , nauk. (Reprint 1967: Russian Reprint Series LX1, The Hague, Europe Printing.) Smidt, S. O., ed.: 1984, , XI-XII ., Moskva, Nauka. ,

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no . Sobolevski, A. I.: 1907, Moskva, , Universitetskaja tipografija. XI XII , Toth, Imre: 1985, Sofia, Izdatel'stvo Bolgarskoj akademii nauk. Vlasto, A. P.: 1986, A Linguistic History of Russia to the End of the Eighteenth Century, Oxford, Clarendon Press. 2ivov, V. M.: 1987, ' No. 1, 46-65. ,' ,

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