Особливості консонантизму староукраїнської мови у грамотах XV ст.

Abstract

The article deals with the language of valuable reminders of the official style – Middle-Age letters. With the help of the end-to-end analysis of the XV century documents there were investigated the special aspects of consonantism of the Old Ukrainian language of that time, the territorial specificity of the witnessed phonetic phenomena was determined. On the basis of the developed methodology for the analysis of written monuments, the first attempt in the Ukrainian studies of systematic investigation of variational phonetic elements was made, the causes of language fluctuations were clarified, the role of dialects, foreign-language influences in the emergence of phonetic and morphological variability of written monuments of the specified period was identified, the place of linguistic parallelism in the formation of a specific literary-written system in the Ukrainian and adjacent territories of XV century was determined. Many important sound changes were observed: the hardening of the consonant [p’], typical of the south-western Ukrainian dialects; the hardening of sibilants, typical of the Ukrainian language system; frequent examples of the hard consonant [ų], characteristic of the North-Ukrainian sub-dialects; assimilation by the soft apical consonants of the neighboring [j], reflected in the modern Ukrainian language; assimilation in the combinations of “sonant + voiceless” and “voiceless + sonant”; simplification in the groups of consonants, present in Ukrainian nowadays; diverse specificity of reflexes of the sound combinations *dj, *zdj; signs of transition [мj]> [мн], typical of the south-western sub-dialects; reflection of sounds [г] and [ґ], etc. Various consequences of the phonemic implementation have led to the development of variability in the consonant system of the Old Ukrainian language of the XV century.