Ways of adapting Greekisms in the Slavic-Russian version of the Euchologion of the Great Church

Abstract

The Slavic-Russian translation of the Euchologion of the Great Church, made at the end of the 14th century by scribes from the circle of Metropolitan Cyprian, contains a large layer of exotic vocabulary. The purpose of this article is to describe the specifics of the adaptation of Greek vocabulary, borrowings, in this translation within the framework of Greek influence, which are known from the South Slavic translations of the 14th century. The article describes the differences concerning the degree of their morphological development, the relationship with their Slavic equivalent and with each other. Different ways of adapting the exoticisms are associated with their semantic heterogeneity in translation. The least ordered is the use of common noun vocabulary, denoting mainly objects of church use: each word that occurs repeatedly has its own set of declination variants. Proper names (or common nouns in the function of proper ones), as well as the names of heretical movements, were more consistently adapted. The frequency of such vocabulary in the Euchologion contributed to the development of typified means of its transmission. Along with techniques traditional for the 14th century for the Slavic tradition (glossing, deliberate use of unadapted foreign words), the translator also uses some new ways of adaptation, which can be considered as signs of the new wave of Greek influence. The new methods include cases of semantization of a variant of Greekism that differs from the traditional one, as well as methods of morphological and morphophonological adaptation of borrowings not known in the previous tradition.