Old Church Slavonic Canon - Phonology

Phonology

For Old Church Slavonic the following segments are reconstructible:

Several notable constraints on the distribution of the phonemes can be identified, mostly resulting from the tendencies occurring within the Common Slavic period, such as intrasyllabic synharmony and the law of open syllables. For consonant and vowel clusters and for sequences of a consonant and a vowel, the following constraints can be ascertained:

• two adjacent consonants tend not to share identical features of manner of articulation
• no syllable ends in a consonant
• every obstruent agrees in voicing with the following obstruent
• velars do not occur before front vowels
• phonetically palatalized consonants do not occur before certain back vowels
• the back vowels /y/ and /ъ/ as well as front vowels other than /i/ do not occur word-initially: the two back vowels take prothetic /v/ and the front vowels prothetic /j/. Initial /a/ may take either prothetic consonant or none at all.
• vowel sequences are attested in only one lexeme (paǫčina 'spider's web') and in the suffixes /aa/ and /ěa/ of the imperfect
• at morpheme boundaries, the following vowel sequences occur: /ai/, /au/, /ao/, /oi/, /ou/, /oo/, /ěi/, /ěo/