An Epitaph to Theodore Tveritin: At the Origins of the Genre

The author’s earlier linguistic and textual analysis of collections containing readings on particularly revered memorable dates and the lives of the most revered saints revealed the manuscript Festal Menaion and Chrysostom from the collection of Tikhonravov No. 185 (from the collection of the Russian State Library) as containing unique information about the Church Slavonic language of the 15th century. This time, as traditionally considered, is a clear indicator of the second South Slavic influence, but evidence of this influence (according to the collection) was not in the Word on the Council of the archangel Michael and Gabriel, the author of which was Clement of Ohrid. There were obvious colloquial elements, but the colloquial (common) facts of the Russian language are especially clearly recorded in another monument of this collection – in the Torment of Paraskeva Friday. In this article, this text is analyzed in comparison with the texts presented in the Great Menaion Reader of the SVT. St. Demetrius of Rostov and in the collection of the 15th century from the Collection of the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius.
 The author defines the broad and narrow contexts of the study. The first is connected with the Church Slavonic problems (language, writing), the second with the 15th century, the time when the so-called ‘second South Slavic influence’ was fully manifested. Church Slavonic itself is not a scientific term, although it emerged from a scientific tradition. We can define what the Russian language is by referring to ethnic and geographical boundaries, cultural and spiritual traditions, historical certainty, and keeping in mind, which is very important for the language, its ‘functional side’. It is impossible to evaluate the Church Slavonic language from these positions. Russian is a language that has developed different principles of development, and in relation to the Russian language, the Church Slavonic language appears to be as much an independent unit (a separate scientific ‘subject’) as the dialect language, which was the subject of lively discussions in its time, or the Russian spoken language, which occupies a strong position in the niche of the Russian language to this day.
 The Church Slavonic language is ultimately the desired object of Slavistic research, and the way to determine its structure and functional status lies through the analysis of specific written sources. The conclusions about the ‘colloquial’ (‘simple’, perhaps common) Church Slavonic language of the Torment of Paraskeva Friday according to the list of Thn-185 are quite obvious, the language of the monument according to this list destroys the myth of the so-called ‘second South Slavic influence’.
 The analysis allows us to take a new look at what we call the Church Slavonic language, to understand that the Church Slavonic language is still an unidentified linguistic object, rather than a philological one, because this language cannot be separated from the text. The text is the environment in which it exists. Linguistics has adopted the tools of linguistic analysis, which since ancient times served philological purposes, it is already presented in the ΤνΝη γραμματική of Dionysius of Thrace, but it did not serve to describe and understand language as such, the main task of grammatics was considered to be the evaluation of the work, “what is the best of all that grammar does”. This helps in the qualification of what is written in the Church Slavonic language: it should not only contain the traditional forms and vocabulary of this language (also with the traditional permissibility of innovations), but also have a functional correlation, correspond to the sphere of existence of Church Slavonic texts.

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.

This paper deals with the issue of using Latin and “Slavensky” (Russian and Church Slavonic) languages in the primary ecclesiastical education in the 18th century. By the 1740s, seminary education in Latin had established itself in Russia. But primary teaching of reading and writing in Russian and Church Slavonic remained traditional until the end of the 18th century, regardless of where the teaching was taking place: at home or at a Russian school at a seminary. The Russian schools were organised for teaching illiterate or semiliterate children. But by the end of the 18th century, several seminaries attempted to reorganise them into ecclesiastical schools where Russian would be the only language of instruction. Junior classes at seminaries were fully focused on teaching Latin, however, Latin was by no means a complete replacement for Russian. The main method of instruction was translation, and the administrations of many seminaries demanded attention to the quality of students’ translations into Russian. Therefore, Russian and Latin were functionally distributed in primary education. Only the Church Slavonic language was practically excluded from teaching after the primary courses of reading and church singing, and it preconditioned its conservation as a language used only for church services and led to the extinction of the hybrid form.

Orfelin's Iskusni podrumar (1783) is the first Serbian book about wine culture and techniques of beverages production and preservation. First great laic intellectual of Serbian 1700s, Orfelin first declared the necessity to write in the spoken language, in order to contribute to people cul- tural elevation; nevertheless, in his works, various linguistic elements (“Languages“ or “Styles“) are evidenced: Russian Church Slavonic, Slavonicised Literary Russian, Serbian vernacular. Due to the mixture of various elements in several of his works, he is often considered the creator of the so-called Slavenosrpski, a sort of hybrid language evaluated in different ways by scholars. Also in Podrumar, contrary to the indication on the frontispiece that it was written in Serbian, it proved to be mostly a mixed language, close to Russian Church Slavonic on the one hand and very close to vernacular, on the other. Furtehrmore, in those parts aimed at providing practical instructions, in which vernacular prevails as well, there are Russian Church Slavonicisms and Russian elements. However, this mixture of linguistic elements must not be attributed to the author's inability to write in pure vernacular. In fact, the only existing linguistic literary model in the Serbian culture of the time was Church Slavonic in its XVIII-century Russian form, artic- ulated in linguistic levels and increasingly oriented towards a spoken language in new literary genres far from ecclesiastical use. So, Orfelin's Slavenosrpski appears as a set of stylistic levels based on Church Slavonic and open to commissions with vernacular at every linguistic level, a way of writing that, even if it marks the beginning of system evolution towards the creation of a modern literary language, still remains anchored to tradition.

What is genre theory a theory of? This paper argues that genre theory is an inquiry into the formation of fundamental categories of interpretation in history, where even the question of whether literary and rhetorical genres are in themselves fundamental is left open. Efforts to theorize genre are therefore beset by paradox since the categories that matter at any given time may not be literary or rhetorical genres. "Mauvais Genres" explores the paradox of genre through an analysis of the historical transition from a late Neoclassical poetics based upon genre to a modern system of philosophical aesthetics based upon trans-generic categories of the beautiful, the ugly, and the sublime, categories that fulfill the genre-function even as they marginalize genre as a means of classifying and evaluating texts. Principal figures are Locke, Shaftesbury, Hartley, Berkeley, Hume, Reynolds, and Baillie.

This paper presents an evaluation of the ways in which three different groups of readers (recordkeepers, teachers and secondary school students) categorise documents. This is used to show how they understand documents, documentary forms and genre. Drawing on a card sorting activity conducted around a set of cards of documents related to The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, the paper discusses the significance of familiar categories as cultural markers (closely linked to particular rhetorical genres). It considers the impact of domain knowledge on the process of sorting and naming of categories, and compares the approaches taken by participants with those of library catalogues. It finds that there is no single, consistent approach to categorising the cards, with different literary genres, rhetorical genres, reasons for using, format, accessibility, and form all affecting the final categories each participant developed.

The article analyzes the morphological features of the Privileges of the Kyiv Magistrate. The text of the record is kept in the Central State Archives (f. 62, in. 1, case 1). These documents are a copy of the 18th century. certificates issued to confirm the Magdeburg law of Kyiv for the years 1544–1659, taken from the private collection of Kozma Krychevets. The study reveals the use of old and new endings in the paradigm of the noun, adjective, numeral, and pronoun in individual cases, which reflects the stage of formation of word change in the Ukrainian language. Adjective word change is characterized by the functioning of mainly compound adjectives and singular nouns. Among pronominal declensions, we notice the use of compound and non-compound forms, clipped forms are used sporadically under the influence of the Polish language. The inflection -ago of Church Slavonic origin is common. Fluctuations in the writing of forms are often reflected both in the same word and in different ones, parallelism is often found side by side. The outlined variability is caused by the lack of normalization of orthographic features, the procedural nature of language phenomena in the analyzed period, the preservation of traditions and the influence of the living language element, the interaction of the phonetic and morphological systems of the Church Slavonic, Polish and Ukrainian languages. Individual word forms found in the analyzed text functioned under the influence of a foreign language, in particular, some were strengthened under the influence of the Polish language, while others were borrowed from it. In some places, Old Slavic elements can be traced in word change (inflection -ago in adjectives, participles). Therefore, the analysis of the nominal parts of speech used in the letters of the Kyiv magistrate shows that in the system of declension of this category of words in the 16–17 centuries new (vernacular) forms were established, which later became the literary norm, archaic elements that were a tribute to the book tradition are also attested in a small amount. Along with such variants, foreign language influences are clearly marked – Polish and Church Slavonic languages. It is most likely that Church Slavonic forms were already included in the copy/translation of the 18th century, since such influences did not appear in records of the business style of previous centuries.

The article is devoted to the study of the lexical inventory of the Old Church Slavonic language. The author proceeds from the idea of the lexical fund of the language as consisting not only of words but also phrases. The lexical inventory of the Old Church Slavonic language was created by the elite circle of literati in the process of translation (mainly from Byzantine Greek). Although the Old Church Slavonic language was based on the folk Slavic speech of the time, most of the Old Church Slavonic compounds and multi-word names were created by Slavic bookmen themselves. Many of these names appeared in the Old Church Slavonic lexicon due to the need to nominate concepts related to Christianity and “medieval encyclopedism”. The basis for the formation of these new names was the morphemic and phraseological calquing of Greek counterparts, which interacted with the mechanisms of nomination in the Slavic folk speech. The article demonstrates that the Old Church Slavonic nominations with multi-word names and compounds reveal “spheres of intersection”. As the author believes, these “spheres of intersection” were caused by the main and most difficult task that Slavic bookmen solved in translating both Greek compounds (or derivatives from compounds) and Greek multi-word names – the transfer of semantics of significant roots. Even within the epoch of the existence of the Old Church Slavonic language proper (i. e. 9th–11th centuries), there are variants of the translation of the same Greek compounds by both Old Church Slavonic multi-word names and Old Church Slavonic compounds. The occasionalisms that arose in the process of word-creation of bookmen in the form of compounds and multi-word names could subsequently be fixed in the usus of the language, but they could also remain hapax both within a certain text and within the entire corpus of Old Church Slavonic texts, which is not completely closed and has been studied extremely insufficiently.

This article has two components. The first is a theoretical discussion of genre, in which two distinct approaches are outlined. Literary genre theory, which has prevailed in biblical scholarship of the past century, is useful but has certain limitations since a literary genre is an historically situated category. Rhetorical genre theory, on the other hand, defines genre in a transhistorical way that allows one to employ it in situations where literary genre theory does not apply, such as when comparing texts from different cultures and time periods. The second part of the article illustrates the preceding through a response to J. Randall Short’s recent monograph, The Surprising Election and Confirmation of King David. The article submits that Short employs an unsound understanding of genre, treating apologetic—a transhistorical phenomenon that appears in all human cultures in various forms—as a literary genre instead of a rhetorical genre.

The article focuses on the issue of using the Latin and “Slavensky” (that is, the combined Russian and Church Slavonic) languages in primary ecclesiastical education in the 18th century. By the 1740s, seminary education in Latin had established itself in Russia. But primary teaching of reading and writing in Russian and Church Slavonic was the tradition until the end of the 18th century, regardless of where the teaching was taking place, either at home or at a Russian school affiliated with a seminary. Russian schools were organized for teaching illiterate or semiliterate children. But by the late 18th century, several seminaries attempted to reorganize “Russian schools” into ecclesiastical schools in which Russian would be the only language of instruction. Junior classes at seminaries were fully focused on teaching Latin, but Latin was by no means a complete replacement for Russian. The principal method of instruction was translation, and the administrators of many seminaries demanded attention to the quality of the students’ translations into Russian. Thus, Russian and Latin were functionally distributed in primary education. Only Church Slavonic was practically excluded from teaching after the primary courses of reading and church singing, and that preconditioned its conservation as a language used only for church services, leading to the extinction of the hybrid form.

The paper traces Old Church Slavonic elements in the Code of Emperor Dušan, a legal monument written in the vernacular, Old Serbian language. Before the end of the 14th century and especially in the 15th century, the text of the Code was subjected to subsequent archaization, with the aim of increasing the share of Old Church Slavonic elements in the linguistic structure, which reflected the spirit of the time, different from the period in which the codex had been compiled. In this context, the paper seeks to determine the real presence of this linguistically marked phenomenon and its function in the text, before the upper chronological limit, set by the oldest surviving manuscript copy in physical terms, the Struga manuscript (ca. 1395). The study compares the situation in the manuscript copies of the older recension, especially in those that were not exposed to major linguistic changes. It is established that during the earliest development of the manuscript tradition of Emperor Dušan’s Code (i.e. the first fifty years after its had been compiled), the Old Church Slavonic phonetics, accompanied by morphology to a limited extent, was the basic means of increasing expressiveness (however, Old Church Slavonic morphological means were hardly at all used in the protograph). The Old Church Slavonic vocabulary present in the Code of Emperor Dušan was generally not phonetically marked; it was in every respect adjusted to the vernacular language system. The use of elements adopted from Old Church Slavonic was, above all, determined by the topic, i.e. it was limited to a particular subject. These elements are not scattered throughout the text, but are mostly concentrated in the legal provisions concerning church law, usually with reliance on the so-called Code of the Holy Fathers. As it turns out, elements of Old Church Slavonic from various linguistic levels are not widely present in the original text of the Code of Emperor Dušan. This presumably reflects the situation in the Old Serbian language of the time, although the language of this legal monument is administrative and not colloquial.

The period of the 16th–17th c. is time of the largest intensity of reforming movements in Ukraine, which were both perceived from West and partially from East and also created on native basic. Reforming movements in every country contained their specific content. Special kind of social movement, specific to "north Renaissance" has formed in Ukraine and related culture was born. It contains revival of medieval mentality merged with adoption of several achievements of Renaissance and Reformation with new specific Baroque phenomenons, raised both from outlined synthesis and completely new. This difficult period of development of Ukraine is characterized by O. Zilinskiy as epoch of the largest dying of material substation of nation, but the epoch of the first synthesis of it’s spiritual forces. It’s discovered, that several representatives of Ukrainian nobility paid great efforts in order to develop Ukrainian language, culture, education and organization of publishing of books on Ukrainian territory. Language divercity in Ukraine in 16th–17th c. impresses and witnesses tolerance of nation. Ukrainian (Rusin), Church Slavic (Slavic), Greek, Latin, Jewish, Armenian, Turkish, Kipchak-Tatarian, Polish, German, Hungary, Italian, French languages were widely spreaded. I. Farion considers, that distribution of language usage was the next: main role of language of state and literature was played by Polish language, Latin language was used in science and judiciary, Church Slavic as sacrificial and mystic language, and national language was only started it’s way to prestigious areas of life. The main trend of Ukrainian literature language in 16th c. was it’s establishment on vernacular basic; literary Ukrainian language until the middle of 16th c. even squeezed Slavic language in genre of confessional literature. The limits and spheres of functioning of many languages were forced by bunch of factors, and the most important of them was confessional. A Ukrainian in 16th–17th c. has the difficult choice: which of familiar to him languages to use. This choice was defined by juridical, political, historical, ethnic and other factors. The language issue ceases to be a purely linguistic issue and becomes a political, social and cultural one.

In the present paper describes theoretical statements of the 18th century Russian authors are described on Aesop's fable published in the introductions, forewords, dedicatory inscriptions to the collections of fairy tales. This literary genre appeared in Russia at the beginning of the 17th century. In 1607, Fyodor Gozvinsky translated Aesop's fables from Greek into Old Church Slavonic (prose). Next two also prosaic translations of works of antique fabulist were prepared in 17th century by Andrey Vinyus and Pyotr Kashinskiy. In 18th century, Sergey Volchkov translated the German translation of a French collection of fairy tales by Aesop and other antique and modern fabulists.

It is well known that the presence of Bulgarian bishops and scholars in Russia around 1400 had triggered literary activities whose aim it was to eliminate elements of the East Slavic vernacular which had penetrated into Church Slavic, and to remodel the orthography, phonology and morphology of the sacral language in accordance with the norms valid in the contemporary Bulgarian redaction of Church Slavic. I shall call the linguistic consequences of these activities the ге-Bulgarization of Church Slavic. It is usually taken for granted that the treatment of the jers in Russian Church Slavic is connected with this re-Bulgarization. While in a verb like *sb-dbrzati, specific Russian jer rules yield the Russian verb сдержать "to hold back", we find in Russian Church Slavic the verb содержати, where the Russian jer rules have not been applied. Kiparsky believes that in this case "artificial reading rules" are involved (1963, 99). In the works of the main representatives of re-Bulgarization we find forms both with ъ and o\ the forms with ъ continue the archaic orthographic tradition. Those with о reproduce the actual pronunciation in ecclesiastic texts. According to B. A. Uspenskij (1967, 78), the changes ъ -> о and 6 -+ e do not appear in this position before the 14th century, where they seem to occur mainly in hymnals. The old texts do not always represent the specific treatment of the jers in the prefixes въand съas well as in the prepositions въ, съ, къ. It is possible, however, to formulate rather vigorous rules about the treatment of the jers in these cases, as it appears in later Church Slavic texts and, for that matter, in Russian borrowings from Church Slavic. The following regularities may be observed:

Phraseological units of Old Church Slavonic language are in the focus of the authors’ attention. These word complexes keep valuable information about the linguistic world-image of the medieval Slavs in the era of blending Christian perception of the world with the pagan one. The purpose of our research is to reconstruct the main fragments of the linguistic world-image. Sacredness, commonness for all the Slavs and cultural value are the fundamental traces of the Old Church Slavonic language which determine semantic nature of more than 4500 set units. All Slavonic manuscripts of the 10th –11th centuries (including east-Slavonic) have become the materials for this study. The authors used synchronous and diachronic approaches in this study. They applied comparative-historical and liguoculturological methods, component and contextual analysis and confirmed the conclusions with statistical data. The analysis carried simultaneously with the work on “The big phraseological dictionary of the Old Church Slavonic language” allowed the authors to get certain results. 1. After Christianization the linguistic world-image of the medieval Slavs has changed. 2. The transformation of the linguistic world-image could go a) due to appearing of new ideas, notions and concepts, such as “The one God”, “God’s grace”, “Martyrdom”, “Self-sacrifice”, “Kingdom of Heaven”, “Christian church”, “Monkhood”, “the Day of Judgment” or b) due to enlarging and reinterpretation of the old well-known concepts, such as “Family”, “Love”, “Honor” and etc. 3. New set units were created according to Slavonic models, and their components were mainly polysemants from the common Slavic lexical fund