Macedonian Language - Documents

[Soldier of Macedon]

Seen this posted on Kajgana months ago and again recently, thought it would be a good little translation project for here. The letters are OCS and some are hard to define because the picture isn't of the best quality.

http://forum.kajgana.com/showthread.php?t=3311&page=4

Illumination, Macedonian Pogodinski Psaltir, 12th century


Anybody care to have a go?

[Soldier of Macedon]

Wow, i'm impressed with the numerous brave souls that wanted to tackle this one, lol. I will start off the first few lines by firstly trying to transliterating the old letters to the current Macedonian alphabet where I can, some or most of it may not be accurate so anybody is free to jump in and highlight the errors so I can correct them. I am just curious to know how this would have appeared and sounded in the 12th century.

Heading: ПСАЛТИР'

1st Line: Красен' ......
2nd Line: Тл'кованије ........
3rd Line: Лажен'м' ж' и женеи
4th Line: Дена с' вјет'не у'стив'и

12th Line: И на пат и грјешних нестамна
13th Line: Седалишти губител' несjеде

16th Line: И....закоње...и бољего в' закоње
17th (Last) Line: его п..... са д'н' и ношт'.

[Дени]

Nothing mysterious. This is just part of the first chapter of Psalms:

[б]лажєнъ мѫжъ ижє нє идє на съвѣтъ нєчьстивы[хъ]
([b]laženŭ mǫžŭ iže ne ide na sŭvĕtŭ nečĭstivy[hŭ])

"Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly".

EDIT: Added transliteration in case some users' browsers can't display the characters.

[Soldier of Macedon]

Never thought of it as a mystery, just want to see how it would look, can you translate the rest in the same manner as you have the first line?

Another thing, can you transliterate the first line into today's English phonetic spelling so we can see how it sounds?

[Дени]

Never thought of it as a mystery, just want to see how it would look, can you translate the rest in the same manner as you have the first line?

I can certainly try and find a clearer transcribed version and do the same; the problem with this scan being that some of the words are contracted (very common practice in OCS texts) and some other words are missing letters.

Another thing, can you transliterate the first line into today's English phonetic spelling so we can see how it sounds?

An English pronunciation respelling would be very inaccurate. I'll do it in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and explain what each letterform represents:

[blaʒɛnŭ mɔ̃ʒŭ iʒɛ nɛ idɛ na sŭvæ(ː)tŭ nɛt͡ʃĭstivyxŭ]

• /b, l, a, ɛ, n, m, ʒ, i, d, s, v, t, t͡ʃ, x/ represent sounds believed to be similar to our /б, л, а, е, н, м, ж, и, д, с, в, т, ч, х/
• [ŭ], an extra short /u/
• [ɔ̃], a nasalized /ɔ/
• [æː], like the <a> in <bad> for Australians
• [ĭ], an extra short /i/
• [y]*, like the <ü> in Turkish

*It's sometimes claimed that <ы> could have represented [ŭi] (a vowel cluster or earlier as two vowels in hiatus) on the basis of it being a ligature of <ъ, ь> and <і>.