Lexemes with the initial element blago in the language of the oldest Russian manuscript The Ladder of Divine Ascent by John Climacus

The concept blago (blessing) is one of the key concepts in Orthodox theology and in the patristic tradition. The complexity and diversity of the semantics of the concept blago found reflection in the Old Russian language. 563 lexemes with the initial element blago are fixed in The Dictionary of Russian Language of the 11th-17th centuries. This article attempts to analyze the named group of words on the material of the oldest Russian manuscript of The Ladder of Divine Ascent by John Climacus. The manuscript is probably written in the middle of the 12th century in Kiev; it is stored in the Russian State Library, in the Rumyantsev Collection under number 198. The manuscript represents the first Slavic translation of the Ladder connected with the Preslav Literary School. In total, there are 23 lexemes with the initial element blago in the manuscript (12 nouns, five verbs, four adjectives and two adverbs). Many of them are calques from the Greek language. Thus, one Greek word (eukharistia) can be rendered by several Slavic words (blagodarenie, blagodarovanie, blagodat'). The most frequent among lexemes with the initial element blago in the text of the manuscript is the lexeme blagodat'. The analysis has clarified the interpretation of the meaning of three lexemes: 1) the adjective blagovol'naya could be substantivized in the meaning "virtue"; 2) the lexeme blagodat' could be used figuratively as "protection"; 3) the same lexeme could be part of the idiom blagodat' krestnaya in the meaning "baptism". In the text of the manuscript the form blagosloviti sya appears in the translation of the Greek katargeo in a citation from the Bible. Reference to the text of the Bible (Greek, Syrian, Georgian, Arabian and Armenian) results in a conclusion that John Climacus incorrectly retold the text of this citation (from memory), and the Slavic translator of the Ladder corrected this mistake of the author in his translation. The translator knew by heart the text of the Epistle to the Hebrews of Apostle Paul. The Slavic translation of the Ladder was made by a talented and well educated person. Presumably, this first translator of the Ladder was an outstanding Bulgarian writer named John Exarch. The adverb blagochestive is absent in The Dictionary of Russian Language of the 11th-17th centuries. Reference to the text of the handwritten sources deepens our knowledge about the lexical richness of the Old Russian language and helps in reflecting this richness in the pages of historical dictionaries of the Russian language.

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