SEER,Vol. 8o, No.3, July 2002 MARGINALIA TurkicLexicalElementsin theIgorTale andthe _S,vvl Zadonscina EDWARD L. KEENAN GIVEN the centralityof the question of the authenticityof the IgorTale, which is either the cornerstone of Russian historical philology or its Original Sin, it is appropriateto offera few comments on the articleby ProfessorNicholas Poppe,Jr (SEER,79, 2001, 2, pp. 20 I -I I) concerning allegedlyTurkiclexical elementsin the IgorTaleand the Zadonscina. There being, as is generallyacknowledged,no indisputableevidence of the existence of the text of the IgorTalebefore the I79os, and no obvious place for it in the record of twelfth-centuryEast Slavicletters, defenders of its authenticity have perforce resorted to indirect arguments . One of these, for more than a century,has revolvedaroundthe alleged presence in the text of a 'pre-Mongol stratum' of Altaic or Turkic lexemes. The logic is simple: if words can be identified as Turkic, and pre-Mongol, and are absent in modern Russian, and, conversely, if later, clearly 'Tatar',words are rare or absent in the Igor Tale,then one can, it is thought, conclude that the IgorTalearose in a very earlystage of Slavic-Turkiclinguisticinterpenetration,perhapsin the twelfthcentury,a few decadesbefore the Mongol invasion. The next step in thisline of reasoningisjuxtaposition of the IgorTale with the Zadons'cina, whose fifteenth- or sixteenth-century Muscovite origin and textual similarityto the IgorTaleno one questions.Here the template of logic is inverted: if more allegedly 'Tatar' (i.e., roughly post-I 220) lexemes are found in the Zadonscina, or if a generallypre-/ post-Mongol configuration in the assortment of Turkic words is perceivedwhen the two texts are compared, then the lateroriginof the Zadonscina is declared,and the authenticityof the IgorTaleaffirmed. A frequently-invokedcorollaryof the latterstep has to do with what Turcologists or others may or may not have known about Turkic historical lexicography in I I85, 1500, or i 8oo. Professor Poppe's article, like his earlier work,' adheres closely to this tradition.In particular,followingRoman Jakobson, he deridesthe idea of a 'mythical'eighteenth-centuryRussianscholarwith a 'magical' Professor Edward Keenan is Director of Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C. ' See his Studiesin Turkic LoanWordsinRussian,Wiesbaden, I97 I, and 'Atextological note on Altaic loan words in the Zadons7c'ina and the SlovoopolkuIgoreve', Scando-Slavica, Tomus 39, I993, pp. I22-27. 480 EDWARD L. KEENAN foreknowledge of later discoveries in Turkic historical lexicography.2 This form of argument is an extension of claims that are made about certain Slavic elements in the Slovo:no known Russian3figure in the late eighteenth century, before the advances of nineteenth-century philology, could have known enough about archaicEast Slavicto have produced the text. But these are risky assertions: while we can be confident about what our predecessorsdid know at some earliertime, we cannot be sure about what they did not know. Thus Professor Poppe'scommentson thismatter,andinparticularhischaracterization of the Kazan' University professor F. I. Erdman, are misleading. Erdman,writingin I842, was not workingin a timewhen 'no adequate referencematerialson Turkicexisted'. By his time at leastfive editions of the famous 7hesaurus Linguarum Orientalium. Lexicon Arabico-PersicoTurcicum of Francoisa Mesgnien Meninski (i 623- I698) were in print, and Erdman's own Kazan' colleague, Aleksandr Troianskii, had recentlypublishedhis two-volumeTatar-Russiandictionary.4 But let us leave the matter of who might have known what about Turkiclanguages in the late eighteenth century, and look more closely at the 'Turkic'evidence itself. There are far fewer authentic Turkic lexemes in the IgorTalethan ProfessorPoppe, and scholarly tradition, would have us believe. His phrasing, 'forty-five archaic words which have been detected and explained as Altaic (Turkic) borrowings', seems to indicate that hie would acknowledgethis fact:it opens the possibilitythat some of those 'detections and explanations' have been proven erroneous, which is definitely the case.5 It is not difficultto understand how this inflated number was accumulated: the very high frequency of hapaxlegomena and ghost-words in the IgorTalehas prompted searches for analogs beyond the Slaviclexical stock,andwhen one searchesthewhole range of Turkic linguisticmaterial (as represented,for example, in Radlov's compendious dictionary)for a 'match'of any given stem, success or 2 His p. 202, n. 4, and p. 208. To the best of my knowledge, no one has considered the candidacy of a non-East...