Church Slavonic Research Articles

обидѫ сътворити или обидҍти? On the Position of Verbal Periphrases with the Semantics of ‘Causing Damage’ in the Old Church Slavonic Lexical Inventory

The article is devoted to the study of Old Сhurch Slavonic verbal periphrases. The concept of «verbal periphrasis» goes back to the conception of Charles Bally, who first drew attention to verbal periphrases, distinguishing them among phraseological phrases (restricted collocations) in French. One-word Greek verbs in the originals of Old Сhurch Slavonic texts can be rendered as one-word Old Сhurch Slavonic verbs and verbal periphrases. The article analyzes the use of one-word verbs and verbal periphrases in Old Сhurch Slavonic within the framework of a small thesaurus Greek-Old Church Slavonic group with the semantics of ‘causing damage’. Greek one-word verbs of the active voice with the semantics of ‘causing damage’ can be rendered by verbal periphrases with the verbs творити, сътворити, дэяти. Periphrases with the verbs приѩти, приимати serve to render the forms of the verbal paradigm of the same Greek one-word verbs but forms of the media-passive voice. The role of informatively compensating dependent words is played by “old” Slavic lexemes обида, врэдъ, пакость, напасть, огавиѥ, inherited, most likely, from Proto-Slavic. The presented material indicates that verbal periphrases with the semantics of ‘causing damage’ were not the result of phraseological calquing of Greek or Latin counterparts but were formed on a proper Slavic basis.

The Pedagogical Tipiṭaka: OER & the Three Baskets of Ancient Language Instruction

Ancient languages present a unique teaching challenge: for spoken languages, common pedagogy recommends engaging students via dialogue; for ancient languages, no speakers survive with whom to practise. This paper highlights how the Linguistics Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin has approached this challenge by creating the Early Indo-European OnLine (EIEOL) collection, an online educational resource whose lesson series present early languages directly through original, unsimplified ancient texts. Currently accessed by over 20,000 users per month, EIEOL spans 18 languages, from Greek and Latin to Old Church Slavonic, Sanskrit, and other important languages of ancient Asia such as Hittite, Classical Armenian, Avestan, and Tocharian. Each series presents extensively annotated excerpts of original texts in the target language, with accompanying modules explaining grammar and context. The text-centred approach affords learners a direct path to understanding that suits a variety of experience levels and minimises the conceptual grammatical apparatus necessary to begin interpreting original texts. This format fosters theoretical flexibility, adaptable to different approaches and grammatical descriptions of ancient languages. It is also useful for languages whose grammatical structures have shifted dramatically over their history, like Tocharian, or remain hotly debated or under-described by experts. Finally, it facilitates applications to typologically diverse languages and language families, with early Mesoamerican, Semitic, and Sino-Tibetan language series already under development. The EIEOL infrastructure therefore provides a robust platform for free, text-centred, self-paced introductions to ancient languages from a variety of language families.

Constructions with reduplication of the referent in sentences with the relative pronoun который in the translation of «Il regno degli slavi» by Mavro Orbini

The article considers some language features of the translation from Italian made by Savva Ragusinsky in the first quarter of the XVIII century by order of Peter I. The historiographic work under consideration is Mavro Orbini’s book «Il regno degli slavi». The author of the article analyses the use of the construction with the pronoun который and the repetition of the referent, which allows identifying the degree of influence of the original language on the translated text, various transformations within the construction or a gradual departure from it. Savva Raguzinsky, while working on the translation, resorts to using the construction 40 times, not always relying on the original text and often using synonyms, which may indicate its consistent destruction. The paper analyses two manuscripts dating from 1714 and currently stored in the library of the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg, the text published in 1722 «The Book historiography of the Commencement of the Name, Glory and Expansion of the Slavic People ...», as well as the original text in Italian. The relevance of the research topic is due to the significant influence of translations from foreign languages on the formation of a new type of language. It was in the Peter the Great era that texts appeared, the language of which modern researchers call «simple», contrasting with the «high Slavonic dialect». There are practically no Church Slavonic and obsolete forms, words and phrases in it. Until now, a generally accepted view of the linguistic situation of the first quarter of the XVIII century has not been developed, and many printed and handwritten monuments of that time have not become the object of research.

Словарь речений из богослужебных книг прот. А. И. Невоструева (понасилую — посредѣ)

The “Dictionary of Locutions from Liturgical Books” by Protopriest A. Nevostruev, completed in the middle of the 19th century and never published, can be regarded both as a significant achievement of Church Slavonic studies and as a valuable lexicographic source. The manuscript is kept in the Russian State Library. The decrepit state of the manuscript has determined the necessity of its urgent study and edition. The significance of this project is primarily due to the fact that the text of the dictionary is being made accessible to linguists for the first time. The orthography and grammar of the dictionary reflect the linguistic views of the time of its creation and can be of interest for those who study the history of Russian linguistics. This paper contains the 6th part of dictionary entries beginning in letter P. The characteristic features of the publication of this Dictionary, the lists of sources, abbreviations and symbols were described in detail in the previous issues of St. Tikhon’s University Review. All previously published parts of the Dictionary together with the critical apparatus can be found at the website of St. Tikhon’s University for the Humanities.

Term ‘zlorastvoreniye’ in liturgical texts: loan translation and re-interpretation

The article analyzes the use of an unclear term “zlorastvoreniye” (traced from the ancient Greek compound word δυσκρασία or its Latin analogue intemperies “bad mixing; immoderation”) and its derivatives in Church Slavonic texts. The paper gives examples of these classical language lexemes and explains how these terms reflect ideas dating back to antiquity about the correct, favorable combination of tangible qualities of the weather. Apart from a single example (the expression “zlorastvoreniye vetrov”), translated into Slavonic from Greek, the article provides examples with phraseological units “zlorastvoreniye vozdukhov / zlorastvorennii vozdusi” from the original texts, whose authors most likely copied Latin phraseology. The work explains the meaning of the petitions from the blessing of the bell worship (which has a Rome Catholic origin, although is not a direct translation) — bell ringing was believed to have a beneficial effect on the phenomena occurring in the air. Moreover, we present examples of how, in connection with the wide spread of the miasmatic theory of diseases in Russia, the studied expressions were reinterpreted by authors who were not experienced in the classical languages as bad smell and contagiousness of the air.

ЗА НЕКОИ ОСОБЕНОСТИ НА ЕРОВИТЕ ВО ЗОГРАФСКОТО ЕВАНГЕЛИЕ

Church Slavonic manuscripts of Macedonian origin created in medieval Macedonian churches and monasteries are of particular importance for the history of Macedonian literacy and for Slavic science in general. Slavic parchment manuscripts with their archaic nature, language peculiarities and diverse content represent a rich Macedonian manuscript heritage. The Zograph Gospel is an ancient Macedonian manuscript with an extremely significant cultural movable and immovable Macedonian heritage, as it is one of the oldest preserved monuments of culture that originates from the Xth or the beginning of the XIth century and is written in the verb script, the original script in which they created the holy brothers St. Cyril and St. Methodius. In our essay, we paid attention to some of the orthographic-phonological peculiarities in original excerpted examples with a contextual display of the verb/Cyrillic script, which represents the beginning of this type of study in Macedonian Slavic studies.

Poetic License, Textual Fidelity and the Liturgical Impulse in Aleksandr Sumarokov’s Early Spiritual Verse

The present essay considers the paraphrases of Psalms and other biblical and liturgical texts that Sumarokov composed between 1744 and 1769. He initially treated his paraphrases primarily as literary exercises: while taking care not to distort the Church Slavic and ipso facto Greek (Septuagint) source texts, he had no qualms about both expanding and abridging the original texts within the confines of traditional metrical and stanzaic structures. Subsequently in the 1760s, he began to experiment with variable iambic and trochaic lines in spiritual verse, though such forms are typically associated with less lofty genres such as fables and epigrams. His experiments in turn allowed him to achieve greater fidelity to the Church Slavic texts targeted for paraphrasis, and to bring his texts stylistically closer to the liturgical norms associated with the Church Slavic originals. At the same time, he strove to improve the fidelity of his own paraphrases of the Psalms by consulting German translations of the Hebrew (Masoretic) originals. Thus, Sumarokov paradoxically brings to his new translations of the 1660s the philological Protestant sensibility of German translations of the Psalter, and an Orthodox sensibility that favors the traditional Church Slavic register associated with the Psalter as a liturgical text. These new translations in free and frequently unrhymed iambs set the stage for the final, more radical experiments undertaken in 1773–1774.

Prophet Elijah as a Weather God in Church Slavonic Apocryphal Works

Prophet Elijah as a Weather God in Church Slavonic Apocryphal Works

Ojczyzna w przekładach biblijnych XVI wieku, powstałych na terytorium Rzeczpospolitej i Wielkiego Księstwa Litewskiego

The article presents an analysis of the concept of homeland in 16th-c. Biblical translations produced on the territory of Poland (the late period of the Jagiellonian dynasty and early Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Those include translations into Polish: the Catholic Leopolita Bible (1561) and the Jakub Wujek Bible (1599), the Protestant Radziwiłł or Brest Bible (1563), the Arian translation by Symon Budny (the Nesvizh Bible) (1572), as well as into Church Slavonic: the Ostrog Bible (1580–1581) or a hybrid translation by Francis Skaryna (1517–1519). It is argued that despite religious and linguistic differences, Biblical translations reveal a large number of similarities. Based on the analysis of these similarities, it can be assumed that the 16th century was a turning point in the development of the concept of homeland, and its formation in the modern understanding was influenced, in different ways, by both the New and the Old Testament.

On Correspondence between Plot and Stylistic Topics in Church Slavonic and Polish Editions of the Kiev-Pechersk Paterikon

On Correspondence between Plot and Stylistic Topics in Church Slavonic and Polish Editions of the Kiev-Pechersk Paterikon

A. N. Radishchev as an "archaist and innovator": linguopoetic and linguostylistic features of the great book (to the 275th anniversary of the birth)

The article considers the most important linguopoetic and linguostylistic characteristics of A. N. Radishchev’s "A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow". The research also focuses on the precedent phenomena in the text of the book, its connections with the European artistic tradition, and influence on the Russian literary language evolution, as well as on particular genres of Russian literature. The text is examined against the background of the dominant literary canons of sentimentalism at the time of its writing; the author creatively mastered some of these canons. Radishchev developed his individual style which synthesised three main linguistic elements: emotional-sensual, civic rhetorical, and common colloquial. Each of them is characterised by a certain set of linguistic means that are compositionally anchored in the text. The figurative devices of classicistic poetics, tropeic expressiveness, refined linguistic expressions borrowed from Western literature, and vocabulary new for the late 18th century form the compositional parts characteristic of the journey as a distinct literary genre. A. N. Radishchev uses Slavicisms, archaic morphological forms and obsolete syntactic constructions, neologisms based on Church Slavonic patterns to create high civic pathos and embody freedom-loving ideas. Low colloquial speech, folk phraseology, folklore inserts, aphorisms, and mixtures of styles shape the author’s narrative fragments and reflections related to specific life situations.

Carved support beams of the Hetmanate

The article examines the carved support beams from the apartments of representatives of the families of the Cossack elders and the Orthodox clergy of the Hetmanate from the last quarter of the 17th till the end of 18th centuries. The creation of multi-ornamented support beams was a kind of confirmation of the social status of the owners of the houses and their artistic preferences, and an expression of the skill level of the master carvers of that time. The aim of the study is to analyze all the support beams of representatives of the Cossack elders and clergy of the 17th and 18th centuries known today and to achieve general undertanding regarding the specifics of these monuments of the material culture of the Hetmanate. For the first time in historiography, on the basis of information about the support beams preserved in museum collections and highlighted in scientific publications, a comprehensive general analysis of these monuments as a phenomenon of material culture was carried out. As a result of the analysis of information about 22 carved support beams of the 17th-18th centuries from the territory of the Hetmanate, it was concluded that the common features of these monuments are the presence (with some exceptions) of straight Orthodox crosses and inscriptions in the Church Slavonic language in the centers of the artefacts. In the ornamentation of the support beams, features characteristic of the late baroque and classicism can be traced. At the same time, both simpler and more richly decorated artefacts exist. The second group includes support beams from the houses of individual representatives of the Cossack elders. Each support beam was a visual manifestation of the owner's wealth and social status, and of their artistic preferences against the background of generally accepted cultural canons. At the same time, carved support beams are examples of the skill of Ukrainian master carvers of the early modern era, which need to be preserved for future generations. In general, the images on these products are permeated with Christian symbolism, although they also contain some symbols that occur in pagan sign systems.

Латынь и церковнославянский как языки «ученого духовенства»: к истории духовного образования в XVIII веке

In the XVIII century, the clergy went through the most important processes related to the formation of the estate; the creation of a system of spiritual education plays an important role in this process. We will look at how the idea of literacy and scholarship as mandatory components of self-image was formed among the clergy, and how the languages included in these ideas have changed over the century. Having analyzed "literacy" and "scholarship" as elements of state regulation of the number of clergy, we will consider the concepts of literacy focused on the Church Slavonic language and literature, and their transformation after the spread of regular seminary "Latin" education. The material of archival documents allows you to see the assessment of the literacy of children of the clergy at admission to the seminary, as well as to understand exactly what skills were included in this assessment. Next, we reconstruct the semantic shift that has been taking place in the attitude of the clergy to seminary education over the course of a century: what kind of learning outcomes did the parents of seminarians expect when sending their children to educational institutions, and how these formulations have changed over the century. The system of spiritual education turns out to be built in such a way as to have priority over home schooling, and Latin is in the focus of attention as the main "filter" that allows separating the "learned" clergy from the "unlearned", i.e. "illiterate. But with the spread of seminary education, the status of "scholarship" begins to be associated no longer with the Latin language, but with less common languages: European (French and German) and "theological" (Greek and Hebrew).

Словарь речений из богослужебных книг прот. А. И. Невоструева (позвизданїе — помѣстный)

The “Dictionary of Locutions from Liturgical Books” by Protopriest A. Nevostruev, completed in the middle of the 19th century and never published, can be regarded both as a significant achievement of Church Slavonic studies and as a valuable lexicographic source. The manuscript is kept in the Russian State Library. The decrepit state of the manuscript has determined the necessity of its urgent study and edition. The significance of this project is primarily due to the fact that the text of the dictionary is being made accessible to linguists for the first time. The orthography and grammar of the dictionary reflect the linguistic views of the time of its creation and can be of interest for those who study the history of Russian linguistics. This paper contains the 4th part of dictionary entries beginning in letter P. The characteristic features of the publication of this Dictionary, the lists of sources, abbreviations and symbols were described in detail in the previous issues of St. Tikhon’s University Review. All previously published parts of the Dictionary together with the critical apparatus can be found at the website of St. Tikhon’s University for the Humanities.

Воспитательный потенциал церковнославянского памятника «Святогорская повесть»

The article describes the experience of using the Church Slavonic monument " Svyatogorskaya Tale" in the context of patriotic education and expanding the scientific horizons of the younger generation obtained by the author during classes with schoolchildren and students of military-patriotic camps in the period from 2007 to 2020 and pilgims.The presentations of the material and features of its use in the classroom are given.The immersion into the historical context of the events described in the story allows us to draw the attention of listeners to edifying moments in the history of North-West Russia in the second half of the 16th century. An important aspect of the use of " Svyatogorskaya Tale" for educational purposes is that of the presence of a theological component and a significant role of the personality of the hero of the story - Blessed Timofey Svyatogorsky describing his high moral qualities. A special significant moment in the entire history of the appearances of the Svyatogorsky icons in 1563 and 1569 underlines the blessing of Russian statehood with its center in Moscow and the conditions for the prosperity of the people and the state. The importance of immersing the listeners into the environment of moral, theological and socio-political problems having been raised in the text of an ancient monument cannot be overestimated. The presented issues of the national importance and mastering them is current for representatives of all regions of modern Russia.

Религиозная лексика в современном русском и польском языках в переводоведческом, лексикографическом и лингвокультурологическом освещении

During the first quarter of the 21st century, Polish and Russian linguistics have been experiencing an intensification of research into the languages of various Christian denominations. In Poland, it is usually the language of the Polish Catholic Church, traditionally associated with the Polish language; in Russia, it is the language of the Russian Orthodox Church, speaking of which, Church Slavonic and Russian are usually meant. Due to the ongoing geopolitical processes, wellknown classical parallels or connections such as “Polish – Catholic”, “Russian – Orthodox” and directions of this kind of research are undergoing changes. In the Polish Orthodox Church, whose ministers and parishioners until recently used mainly Church Slavonic and Polish, today they increasingly turn to Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian and other Slavic languages in their daily lives. Therefore, against the background of the predominance of Catholicism and the Polish language, problems arise with the correct interpretation and correct understanding of basic religious names by representatives of various Christian denominations speaking related Slavic languages. As a result, there are studies of parallels and connections such as “Polish, Russian, Ukrainian – Orthodox”, and questions arise, the answers to which can be tried to find in lexicography.

Old Testament translations in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and their contexts

From the 15th century onwards, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was a multiconfessional and multicultural state. Apart from Lithuanians, its population comprised Ruthenians (the ancestors of Belarusians and Ukrainians), Poles, and smaller Jewish, Tatar, and Karaim communities. After its Christianization, Lithuania officially fell under the jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic Church, but most of its inhabitants were of the Eastern Christian rite. Reformed Protestantism spread among the nobility at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries, while Lutheranism flourished in Lithuania Minor. Smaller ethnic groups also had their confessional communities. All confessional groups had their sacred books. This article gives an overview of Christian vernacular translations of the Old Testament that were read in the Grand Duchy between the 15th and the 18th centuries. It briefly discusses the circumstances of the translation of the Old Testament into Ruthenian (the Skaryna Bible), Old Church Slavonic (the Ostrog Bible), Polish (the Brest, Nesvizh and Gdansk Bibles) and Lithuanian (the Bretkūnas, Chylinski and Quandt Bibles) as well as their characteristic features.

SPELLING OF THE NOUN КОНТР-АДМИРАЛ IN THE HISTORY OF RUSSIAN WRITING

: The article is devoted to the problem of substantiating the hyphenation of the noun контр-адмирал in diachrony and modern writing. The purpose of the article is to establish the usual and codified spelling norms of this lexeme and to trace their dynamics. The usage is established by sampling on the material placed in the National Corpus of the Russian Language. In addition, the material of grammars and dictionaries of the 18th and 19th centuries is used: The Dictionary of the Russian Academy of the turn of the 18th–19th centuries in two editions, Dictionary of the Church Slavonic and Russian Language (1847), grammars by N.I. Grech (1827), A.Kh. Vostokov (1831), the Academic Grammar of 1849. Nouns beginning with контр- are not codified strongly enough in this period, but the tendency to hyphenate such words develops in the next century and persists to the present day. Obviously, it was originally supported by the tradition of using capital letters in the composition of words such as контр-адмирал. As the uppercase letters were eliminated here, the authors of the 1956 Rule put forward the idea of the semantic separateness of the hyphenated use of контр-, as opposed to the normative confluent use. In the 2020s, the newest academic IPS resource “Spelling Comments on the Russian Dictionary” made an unsuccessful attempt to explain the peculiarities of the spelling of the word контр-адмирал with the meaning ‘low’, which is not confirmed by dictionary data. Obviously, the retention of the hyphenated form of контр-адмирал is due to the orthographic tradition and the desire to isolate morphemes in writing.

O modlitwach w Podróży do Świętych miejsc w 1830 roku Andrzeja Murawjowa

Conversation with God accompanied people of various times, nations and religions, because of a universal dimension of the desire for dialogue with the Absolute. The article attempts to analyze those of the prayers which Andrey Muravyev, a Russian writer, poet, state and church activist, practiced during his first pilgrimage to Palestine. Texts of the prayers were from The journey to Holy Places in 1830 (2 vols), which is a record of the author’s experiences and impressions from his pilgrimage to the Holy Land. As an epigraph to both parts of this Muravyev’s work, the words from Ps 135(134) – a hymn of praise to the Lord who works miracles – were served. Attention of the article is paid to: the sense of the prayers, their biographical and literary context, the lexical and partly grammatical material, which Muravyev used (making necessary reference to the Greek and (or) Hebrew sources of Church Slavonic translations of the prayers) and their theological message as well.

The Rule of Replacing the Grave with an Acute in Church Slavonic: Further Details

The study is devoted to the rule of replacing the grave (varia) with an acute (oksia) over the final stressed vowel in Church Slavonic texts of modern period. The inventory of enclitical forms that require this rule is specified in the corpus survey of liturgical texts published in Moscow, with the Bible and the Philokalia being used as additional material. The study of the sources shows that this inventory includes not only the particle and the conjunction zhe, particles bo, li and the pronouns mi, ti, si, mya, tya, sya, ny, vy, as is usually considered in Church Slavonic textbooks, but also the verbal forms esi, est’ (in the Bible also esm’, sut’), the subjunctive mood indicator by. In addition, there are rare combinations with pronouns se and ty and the element libo. Special attention is paid to the enclitic by, which is used in the corpus in two variants: with and without an accent. The article has established that the choice of a particular variant depends on its contextual environment or on its position in relation to other word forms.