Secondary ?vocalization? of the jers

Abstract

It is well known that the presence of Bulgarian bishops and scholars in Russia around 1400 had triggered literary activities whose aim it was to eliminate elements of the East Slavic vernacular which had penetrated into Church Slavic, and to remodel the orthography, phonology and morphology of the sacral language in accordance with the norms valid in the contemporary Bulgarian redaction of Church Slavic. I shall call the linguistic consequences of these activities the ге-Bulgarization of Church Slavic. It is usually taken for granted that the treatment of the jers in Russian Church Slavic is connected with this re-Bulgarization. While in a verb like *sb-dbrzati, specific Russian jer rules yield the Russian verb сдержать "to hold back", we find in Russian Church Slavic the verb содержати, where the Russian jer rules have not been applied. Kiparsky believes that in this case "artificial reading rules" are involved (1963, 99). In the works of the main representatives of re-Bulgarization we find forms both with ъ and o\ the forms with ъ continue the archaic orthographic tradition. Those with о reproduce the actual pronunciation in ecclesiastic texts. According to B. A. Uspenskij (1967, 78), the changes ъ -> о and 6 -+ e do not appear in this position before the 14th century, where they seem to occur mainly in hymnals. The old texts do not always represent the specific treatment of the jers in the prefixes въand съas well as in the prepositions въ, съ, къ. It is possible, however, to formulate rather vigorous rules about the treatment of the jers in these cases, as it appears in later Church Slavic texts and, for that matter, in Russian borrowings from Church Slavic. The following regularities may be observed: