The «Weak link» in Church Slavonic grammar: the participles

Abstract

The article presents the results of linguatextual observations on several Church Slavonic copies of the Gospel from the 11th–12th centuries. Not all the copies documenting the early translation of the Greek manuscript are directly related; they represent different editions of the text and testify to the use of different Greek copies. The analysis of correlative grammatical forms shows certain changes in the language system of the

Church Slavonic language. The subject of the study in this case is the participial forms, some of the most “bookish” ones in the grammatical system of the Russian language, a definitive heritage of the Church Slavonic tradition in our language. The instability of these forms in Church Slavonic and Russian texts, usually associated with a considerably late period in the development of Russian writing, turns out to be motivated by the most ancient manuscripts. Of particular interest are manuscripts that represent translations from Greek, especially those that, on Slavic-Russian ground, provide evidence of repeated references to the Greek text. Church Slavonic texts are of exceptional interest to the history of the Russian literary language. Church Slavonic manuscripts of the Old Russian period (from the end of the 14th to the beginning of the 15th century) deserve unconditional attention, since this was the time of transition from Old Russian bookishness to the literature of the new time, which subsequently formed a national language as a result of convergence with business writing. And, perhaps, the main thing that this century (if we designate this period of time as a century) did with the Russian language is that it provided the verbal culture with the transition from the language-text (which the Church Slavonic language was and remains) to the literary language and prepared the further perception of spoken speech as an object worthy of special attention. The fate of participles, a vivid manifestation of bookish speech culture, in literary and colloquial language is of exceptional interest, but their written history begins with the first (early Church Slavonic) manuscripts, and this must be taken into account.

Initial provisions of this study: firstly, the exceptional importance of translated manuscripts for the history of Russian literature. Church Slavonic, which arose as a calque-language from Greek, continued to expand its book (and therefore language) collection largely through written sources of Byzantine origin; secondly, the presumption of a Greek text (since most translations were made from Greek originals). The concept and the term presumption (an assumption that is considered true until the falsity of such an assumption is indisputably proven) are widely used not only in jurisprudence, but also in natural sciences. In this case, we address the Greek copies as a possible source of discrepancies in Church Slavonic copies of the Gospel.

The most important source of the development of the Russian literary language was and still is text of the Gospel; it underwent several editions on Slavic basis. For Church Slavonic literature (and later for Russian literature) this was at first a life-organizing, and then a life-forming factor of existence and development. It is in the “lexical environment” of the Church Slavonic Gospel that one should look for the sources of the richest synonymic system of the Russian literary language, and not so much, perhaps, as the fact of the very presence of different lexemes (different Greek translated words or presented by different regional language environments), but as the fact of the very possibility of a diverse verbal presentation of a clear and unambiguous in its definition content. It is obvious that the “grammatical environment” of the Gospel also determined the grammar of the Church Slavonic language as a whole, and the “movements” that occurred in this grammar throughout its entire length were motivated by its original state already in the most ancient manuscripts.