A Lexical Borrowing or a Slavonic Equivalent: An Attempt of Linguistic-Textual Analysis of Lexical Variability at the Initial Stages of the History of Church Slavonic Hymnography

The aim of the present study is to identify factors contributing to the introduction of foreign vocabulary into the Church Slavonic language at the early stages of the Slavonic written tradition in the general context of the Greek and Church Slavonic language contacts and of the translation as the main way of the linguistic and cultural transfer. In order to achieve this aim, a comparative linguistic-textological analysis of multilingual lexical variants in the Slavonic translations of Byzantine hymns was conducted. The study was made on the material of three hymnographic texts included in the liturgical books of Lenten Triodium and Pentecostarion: the Akathistos Hymn, the Great Canon of Repentance by St. Andrew of Crete and the Great and Holy Friday Antiphons. Eleven South Slavonic and East Slavonic of the 12th to the 14th centuries were used for the analysis. These scripts were previously divided into four main versions, which appeared as a result of the corrections of the Slavonic text by the Greek original. In these texts, 16 groups of two- or three-member bilingual variants were found and analyzed in 25 contexts. Though in the first Slavonic translations the source language vocabulary was introduced into the texts to a limited extent and only in order to designate phenomena unknown to the Slavs' cultural realities, the analysis of changes made in the texts by Slavonic editors up to the Mount Athos 14th-century corrections showed a general trend of replacing source language borrowings with corresponding words of the target language (originally Slavonic vocabulary and borrowings already adapted in the language). On the other hand, in four cases, the inaccurate Slavonic equivalents used by the first translators were later corrected by the source language borrowings in order to separate the Slavonic equivalents and the Greek words and concepts at the lexical level. The comparison of the data obtained with the results of the analysis of the Gospel and philosophical and historical Slavonic translations showed the dependence of translation techniques on the genre of the text and on the time of translation. If at the initial stages of the Slavonic written tradition variations were allowed in the translations of the same Greek words depending on the context, the editors of Mount Athos corrections tended to the word-by-word equivalence of the Greek and Slavic vocabulary. Thus, up to the 14th century, the influence of the Greek language on the Church Slavonic one can be observed mainly at the level of system relations, not at the level of borrowed vocabulary.

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