Language and orthography of Kopitar’s gospel in the context of the Bosnian Church Slavonic literacy

Kardaš, Mehmed. (2018). Language and orthography of Kopitar’s gospel in the context of the Bosnian Church Slavonic literacy. PhD Thesis. Filozofski fakultet u Zagrebu, Department of History.
(Poslijediplomski doktorski studij medievistike) [mentor Žagar, Mateo and Nakaš, Lejla].

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Abstract

Kopitar’s gospel, stored in the University Library in Ljubljana (Cod. 24), is one of the thirty preserved texts of the Bosnian Church Slavonic literacy. The codex is written in the second half of the 14th century under the auspices of the Bosnian Church, but is soon after the fall of the kingdom found in the Orthodox monastery, where the original appearance of the codex was amended to the liturgical ritual of the Serbian Orthodox Church. The philological research of this codex, based on comparative study with other representatives manuscripts of the Bosnian group, imposed itself as a task of research whose results should provide important information about it and the process of editing his text at all language levels, then about the place of the manuscript in relation to the Church Slavonic canonical but also the gospels of the Bosnian school. The entire codex, which is by all the features – codicological, graphetic and linguistic – a typical representative of the Bosnian school, was written by one scribe, in Western Cyrillic type, while the spelling habits of this writer show the following of the Bosnian orthographic tradition. The language of Kopitar’s gospel marks the breakthrough of dialectal innovations from the Western Shtokavian substrate. Besides Ikavian, in the Codex it is registered the reflex j <* dj, rare reflection of the group va < vь. Furthermore, other linguistic features are recorded, which testify about the condition of the Shtokavian speech, such as the vocalization of the semivowel /a/, and the reflex u < vь etc. On a morphological level, the text indicates a certain conservatism, which is best reflected in the preservation of archaic categories such as the asigmatic aorist, but also of older grammatical endings, although the breakthrough of innovations from the grammatical structure of the Shtokavian speech are sporadically recorded, while the syntax level also confirms the faithful following of canonical gospels. The textological analysis of Kopitar’s gospel has shown that there are two basic layers in the substrate of this manuscript – the older, which connects the Bosnian gospels with the canonical and also testifies about antiquity and the unity of the Bosnian group of texts, and the younger – which distanced Kopitar’s gospel from the Bosnian tree and brings it closer to the manuscripts of younger redactions of the Church Slavonic translation of the gospel. Based on the research carried out, for the graphic and the language of the Kopitar’s gospel, it can be stated that it is a typical example of the model of the Church Slavonic that was used in medieval Bosnia at the second half of the 14th and the beginning of the 15th century.

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