The Impact on the Dresden Bible's Gospel of Luke and the Book of Isaiah of three phonetic and phonological changes of the fourteenth century
Abstract
The study investigates the impact on the Dresden Bible, which contains a very early copy of the oldest translation of the entire bible into Old Czech, of three fourteenth century phonetic and phonological changes. Specifically, diphthongization ó > uo (and an irregular change o > uo) and two Old Czech umlauts, 'u > i (and 'ú > í) and 'o > ě (and 'ó > ie), are analysed.
In addition, possible problems in interpreting the third Old Czech umlaut are outlined. The analysis focuses on transliterated texts of the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Isaiah in the edition Staročeská Bible drážďanská a olomoucká.
Phonetic and phonological changes are examined with the help of statistical methods in order to describe these changes more accurately and determine differences of interest with respect to statistics. In order to achieve this goal, all the examples excerpted were manually tagged, sorted out and statistically processed.