LIGATURES IN THE RYAZAN KORMCHAYA BOOK OF 1284

The article describes ligatures and principles of their writing in the Ryazan Kormchaya of 1284 (RK), which is an East Slavic copy of the Kormchaya Book of the Serbian redaction. The Ryazan manuscript was executed by ten scribes, who copied an exemplar that had been divided into five parts for convenience. The second scribe was the main one; he copied his part of the text and more than ten other fragments. His handwriting contains the greatest number of ligatures, which he writes anywhere in the line, both in the middle and at the end of words. Other scribes who copied this manuscript also used ligatures, but their number and variety are incomparable with those found in the text of the second scribe. The use of ligatures in the end of the lines is a practice common to the writing technique of all the scribes who produced the manuscript. In these cases, not only letters with straight vertical and slanted lines are joined, but also graphemes with an oval, semi-oval and other lines. Another commonly shared practice is the use of identical twoletter ligatures in certain roots and word forms, as well as in some morphemes not at the end of the line. Three-letter ligatures are also used, though rarely. One word may contain more than one ligature. As a result, in the handwriting of the second scribe of the RK, a tendency towards the ligature type of writing is observed.