THE ORTHOGRAPHIC INNOVATIONS OF PATRIARCH NIKON’S REVISION OF BOOKS

The article describes the spelling innovations in the Moscow modifi cation of the Church Slavonic language, which occurred during the 1650s. It is usually considered that significant changes of norms took place under Patriarch Nikon under the influence of Southwest Russian books which were used as correction exemplars in preparing new Moscow editions. However, many spelling innovations that changed the norms of the occurred in 1652, when the new editor Euthymius Chudovsky started working at the Moscow Printing Court. In the editions prepared under his supervision, the letter й was introduced at the end of Nominative-Accusative singular forms of the adjective, the homo nyms миръ ‘peace, silence’ (Greek εἱρήνη) and мjръ ‘universe, cosmos’ (Greek κόςμος) were differentiated in spelling, a new rule for the use of the doublet letters u/у was implemented. These norms were applied also in Southwest Russian editions, but their influence on the Moscow editorial practice was indirect, through lexicographical works and Smotritsky’s Grammar of 1619.
The first Moscow edition for which a Southwest Russian correction exemplar was used was the 1655 Euchology, in which the Greek diphthong ει in borrowed words is trans cribed as і. In the next editions, the spelling of the word Израиль (Greek. Ἰσραήλ) was changed according to the Greek spelling, the letter w is used in the function of a marker, the apostrophe is placed above the plural forms of the words iže, jaže, imъ. However, these innovations do not replicate Kievan spelling norms: the ideas were borrowed, but their implementation was completely original. On the whole, Moscow spelling norms did not change signifi cantly in the 1650s: rather, the principles that were adopted in the 1640s continued to expand.