Rasprave Instituta za Hrvatski Jezik i Jezikoslovlje (Jan 2007)
The morphonological model of palatalization of the dental sonants in the 1st person singular of the present tense in Croatian Church Slavonic
Abstract
The article discusses the morphonology of the verbal stem in the present tense paradigm based on the data of Croatian Church Slavonic (CCS) verbs with the basic stem ending in -i- with the preceding dental sonant: r, l, n (e. g. tvori-ti, moli-ti, brani-ti). All the verbal lexemes of that type found in the corpus of the Dictionary of Church Slavonic of the Croatian redaction (Rječnik crkvenoslavenskog jezika hrvatske redakcije) are taken into consideration: 83 ri-verbs, 110 li-verbs and 127 ni-verbs and their present tense forms. In Old Church Slavonic the verbal stem of these verbs is truncated in the present tense paradigm (i. e. the suffix -i- is truncated) and appears in two variants: in a palatal variant (in the 1st person singular) and in a non-palatal (in all other forms); so in the present tense paradigm the alternations l ~ ĺ, n ~ ń i r ~ ŕ are found. In the CCS texts the most innovative are ri-verbs. Since in Croatian the phoneme ŕ was depalatalized, riverbs had not preserved the OCS morphonological pattern: The CCS data do not show the OCS alternation r ~ ŕ and the variation of the stem in the present tense paradigme (the truncated stem in all person-number forms ends in a non-palatal consonant). Although li-verbs and ni-verbs have preserved the OCS morphonological pattern, but the CCS texts testify a certain number of deviations from the pattern. Some of the scribes in rare cases used the letter u instead of ű after the letters l, n in the 1st person singular (e. g. molu, branu instead of molű, branű). The author of the article suggests various possible explanations of the mistake and determines to what degree the phenomenon is characteristic of certain CCS texts.
