Varying Means of Grammatical Parallelism in the Church Slavonic Translations of Psalms of the 11th–16th Centuries

Abstract

As a metrically organized poetic text, the Psalter is built on the principle of substantive and formal parallelism of verses and stanzas in the Hebrew text as well as in Greek and Church Slavonic translations. In the article, based on the material of Slavic translations of different times (from the Sinai Psalter of the 11 th century to the Psalter of 1552 by Maximus the Greek), cases of assimilation / dissimilation of grammatical forms in parallel text structures are considered. The variability which arises in the process of dissimilation has neither genetic (South Slavonic vs East Slavonic, archaic vs new, standard vs non-standard forms), nor functional (literary vs non-literary forms), but rhetorical nature of stylistic variation, conditioned by the structure of the text. The analysis revealed that in early Slavonic psalter redactions the choice and the number of variable grammatical forms are limited; the texts of the 16 th century, namely the Psalms of 1552 translated by Maximus the Greek, are particularly characterized by stylistic grammatical variability, concerning the most different forms (from the substantive Gen. and Dat. cases to the aorist and perfect in the 3 rd person). The examined cases of the dissimilated grammatical forms in parallel contexts of the Psalter are supported by some original Maximus the Greek's works, so that these forms should be considered as stylistic variants of the literary Church Slavonic language.