The Novgorod Antiphonal Psalters: Their Orthographical Peculiarities and Textological Significance

Abstract

The thirteenth-century Novgorod antiphonal psalters were written for liturgical use by two choirs or readers in alternation; consequently each of them contains an incomplete version of the psalms, and they complement each other only in part. Nevertheless, they are of interest both in relation to the development of Church Slavonic norms of orthography and orthoepy as well as from a textological standpoint. In one of them, the older of the two, the infiltration of dialect pronunciation into the Novgorod variety of Church Slavonic can be detected (a list of the various different examples of cokan′e in this manuscript is provided in the appendix). On the basis of an analysis of the variant readings found in both manuscripts or attested in either of the two sources, it is demonstrated that they belong to Redaction II of the Church Slavonic translation of the psalms, and that they are important witnesses to the dissemination of this redaction among the East Slavs up to the end of the thirteenth century.