О правопису и језику повеља и писама Вука Бранковића

Abstract

In this paper, the basic orthographic and linguistic characteristics are studied in six original charters and letters of Vuk Branković addressed to Dubrovnik and the Hilandar Monastery. The basic goal of the paper is the establishment of the basic orthographic characteristics in the context of the “pre-Resava evolution” of Serbian orthography, and also the basic language characteristics in the context of our current knowledge about the development of Serbian dialects in the regions of Knez Lazar and Vuk Branković. The orthographic analysis indicates that, in the charters and letters of Vuk Branković addressed to Dubrovnik, and also in one Hilandar monastery charter (1376‒1377), the Raška orthography is used with a minimal influence of the Resava orthography features, while two Hilandar monastery charters from the last decade of the14th century exhibit the Resava orthography features more. The linguistic analysis indicated a high degree of similarity with the state of things in the charters and letters of Knez Lazar and Despot Stefan Lazarević, both in terms of the basic features of the phonological system (the Ekavian reflex of jat, the absence of examples of /ә/ > /a/, syllabic /l/ > /u/, /l/ at the end of the syllable > /o/), and also in terms of those features that indicate the southeastern Serbian dialect in the last quarter of the 14th century as the dialectal basis of the language of the charters and letters (the Ekavian reflex of jat in the Dat./Loc. sg. of feminine nouns and the second person plural imperative, along with the shorter forms of infinitives without the final -i).