Morphological phenomena in the Nobel Gospel of 1520

Abstract

The article discusses morphological phenomena in the Nobel Gospel, the written monument from Polissia dating back to 1520. The monument was copied out in Church Slavonic with some features of the vernacular primarily exhibited in phonetics and orthography. The study attempts to reveal the morphological phenomena that characterize the impact of the vernacular and contribute to broader language variation in the manuscript. It describes some of the morphological phenomena in different parts of speech (the noun, the adjective, the verb). Morphological features are compared in different parts of the monument: the four Gospels and the afterword. The latter contains the synthetic perfect form. The study examines language contamination observed in the combination of phonetic features of Church Slavonic and morphological features of the Ukrainian language such as the final -мо/-мw in verbs. It is essential to take into account the Second South Slavic Influence on the morphological characteristics of the text, e.g. orthographic change of о -w in the endings -ови/-wâè of masculine singular nouns in the dative case or in the final -мо/-мw of the first person plural verbs in the present tense. The study demonstrates that the text morphology is influenced by orthographic and phonetic variants h – è, h – å typical of the language continuum in Polissia. The article explains the interaction between the hard and soft types of declension in singular masculine nouns in the dative case under the condition that nouns with the former base in *jǒ acquire secondary flections -ови/-wâè. To characterize the morphological features of the Ruthenian variant of Church Slavonic, the Nobel manuscript was compared with the monuments of the same confession dating from the previous period of the 14th–15th centuries. A comparison with the Peresopnytsia Gospel, which is a translation into the Ruthenian (Old Ukrainian) language performed in Volyn, dating from the middle of the 16 century, gives grounds to confirm the conclusion about partial morphological changes in the Church Slavonic Gospel from Nobel and systemic features of the Ukrainian language represented in the translation from Persopnytsia.