The Use of the Letter Omega in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Rjazanian Legal Documents
Syeng-Mann
Yoo
The presence of the two mid-back vowels (open
o and closed ô) in
some contemporary South Russian dialects including regions of Kursk,
Orel, Kaluga, Belgorod, Vorone&zhachek; and Rjazan&soft; suggests that
two different phonemes might have existed in the dialects of these
regions in medieval times. Kotkov (1963: 28–35) provides such
data in seventeenth-century South Russian manuscripts as
roitarskova struju, dragunskova struju, rabutu, dubruvu,
upolunnikov, etc., which can be interpreted as graphic
reflections of closed /ô/. Based on these examples, Kotkov
claims that there was the phoneme /ô/ in some South Russian
dialects, including Rjazanian dialects.
In this paper, I tried to verify whether Kotkov's claim holds in a
corpus of texts that are the principal relics of medieval Rjazanian
dialects. In most of the previously investigated manuscripts, there
are four systems in the graphic representation of the phonemes
/ô/ and /o/, i.e., kamora system, omega system, the
narrow-o
system and the
wide-o
system. (Zaliznjak 1990:
2–5).Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Rjazanian legal documents
under investigation belong to the omega system. Most of the fifty
documents show two letters, omega and o. Only two
documents (No. 1, 50) exemplify the single letter <o>, but they
are not long enough (less than a half page long each) to claim that
the scribes of these documents did not use the letter omega. Two
issues are discussed: (1) Were there any patterns in the use of the
letter omega in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Rjazanian legal
documents, or was the use of the letter omega just at random? (2) If
the use of omega follows certain patterns, what are the possible
implications? Does the letter omega reflect any phonological/phonetic
reality of the given times or is it still a purely graphic device
reflecting orthographic traditions? To answer the first question, I
collected all the examples of the letters omega and
o, and then tried to determine whether there were
any tendencies in their distribution. To answer the second question,I
paid special attention to those slots in a phonological words that
were reflexes of the Late Common Slavic acute or neo-accute
accent. Presumably these slots would be the ones that were most likely
to exemplify the letter omega consistently, if there was the phonemic
distinction between /ô/ and /o/.
The investigation reveals that the letter o
and omega did not represent separate phonemes in the dialect
represented in the corpus. The use of the letter omega was purely
graphic and traditional. Yet, there are certain patterns in its
graphic distribution. Two positional principles apply: (1) the letter
omega was used after another vowel letter. (2) The letter omega was
used in the initial slot of phonological words. These two positional
principles were constrained by an ordering restriction: Positional
principle 2 was applied before positional principle 1. There are also
certain morphemes that have relatively higher frequency of the use of
the letter omega. On the other hand, the letter o
was unmarked or default letter so that it could be used in the place
of the letter omega. However, the opposite case rarely happens, and in
case it happens, it can be ascribed to hypercorrection.