The Primary Slavic Complex of Liturgical Books of the Byzantine Rite (“Clement’s corpus”) and the Formation of the Macedonian Redaction of Church Slavonic

Abstract

The article elaborates on the basic linguistic features of the Macedonian redaction manuscripts. A survey of the characteristics is presented on different levels: orthographical, phonological, morphological, lexical, and the level of word formation. Linguistic features of these texts can contribute to their more precise localization, indicating that the manuscripts analyzed here are related to the wide zone of southern and western Macedonian dialects, a wider area in which the activities of the Ohrid Literary School took place. The lexicon of the manuscripts, especially the Greek loanwords present, leads to the conclusion that the place of their formation is a Slavic-Greek contact zone. Part of this paper is dedicated to the comparison of rare lexicon and productive word formation models present in a group of Church Slavonic manuscripts of Russian redaction. The comparative analysis of the lexicon and word formation models can help in establishing the corpus of books of the Byzantine rite that were created in the period of activity of Cyrillo-Methodian disciples, under the leadership of Clement of Ohrid. It is obvious that part of that corpus was the main liturgical book, the Gospel, and some previous works have verified that the Menaion was also translated in this literary center. Based on the analysis made in this work, it can be noted that the same rare lexicon and word formation models, in many cases verified in the hymnographic works of Clement of Ohrid, characterize the Apostle, Psalter with commentary, Triodion, Euchologium, and Prophetologion, leading to the conclusion that all these books were part of Clement’s corpus.