H. Tóth Imre

Lieli P.

English

University of Szeged

195 Тот. Русская редакция древнеболгарскош лзыка в конце М-татале Ж вв. София, Изд—во Болгарской академии наук, 1985, 358 с. The work reviewed below can be considered a significant result in Hungarian Slav studies. For decades the author has been a well-known and highly acclaimed scholar of Old Russian (OR) and Old Church Slavonic (OCS) language monuments, both in Hungary and abroad. He can also be credited with both the discovery and initial description of several such monuments. This book can also be evaluated as a kind of synthesis of this work in this field. The term "древнеболгарский" (Old Bulgarian, OB) is consist-ently used, not only in the title but also throughout the whole book, instead of the generally accepted "старославянский" (OCS). The revival of this term, based on the 19th century — mainly German — tradition, does not seem to be out of place at all in the given context, since the author is consistent in indicating the Bulgarian. character of the protographs of the language monuments studied, making a subtle distinction even between their East and West Bulgarian dialectal features. What is this book not about? Its thematic restrictions are fixed as early as the foreword: it is not about the origins of literary language or the historical grammar which marked different changes in the Russian language. The author's chief aim is to give a manysided analysis of the Russian 'recension' of OB language monuments and to show the process of their russification. For this purpose the material of 10 early, 11th c. manuscripts is used. Several of them were previously presented by the author in different publications, mainly in the periodicals Studia Slavica and Dissertationes Slavicae (Szeged). Although these monuments are relatively short in themselves, they nonetheless amount to a considerable corpus of 140 pages. The following manuscripts are included: the Sluck Psalter, the one-jer part of Antioch's Pandects, the Turov Gospel Folia, the Lives of Condrat and Thekla, the Dubrovskij Menology, the Byckov Psalter, the Cyrillic part of the Reims Gospel, the second, evangelical part of the Savvina kniga. The voluminous bibliographies after reviews of the manuscripts, which cover every detail and are composed with great philological care, prove that each of them is of Bulgarian origin and each of them was copied in the second half of the 11th c. in the East Slavic language area. The author's attention is turned towards the russianisms which gradually replaced and ousted OB features. These 196 are different and well-known phonetic and morphological points (17 altogether), here we mention only some of them: ж, a replaced by оv and a reflecting denasalisation; Common Slavic (CS) *dj, *tj-» OR ж, v; the phenomenon called 'full vocalism', the problem of 'nasal' fc, the endings of the Instr. sing. masc. and neutr., the contracted forms of imperfect, etc. Reading the criteria of russification one can put, however, some questions deriving from a certain feeling of incompleteness. First of all, no comment — not even a remark of refusal to accept the obligation — is made on the lack of lexical and syntactic research. One can only guess the reason (apart from the technical details of a restricted number of pages of any book): copying strictly ecclesiastical and canonized texts meant that the scribes could not (and were not allowed to) deviate too much from the original exactly on these levels. This is why the lexical and syntactic isoglosses, taking shape, by the way, more slowly and later than others, could hardly leak through. Further on: some additional morphological criteria can also be recommended for consideration. Such points are meant as, e.g., the supremacy of the secondary (or octi) aorist forms or the abundance of the old u-stem endings — not only in the Instr. sing. masc. and neutr., which may be, too, indica-tive of a certain extent of russification.1 Apart from these linguistic criteria the first place in the analysis, however, is occupied by the thorough graphic and orthographic description of the manuscripts, the chapter entitled "От графики к орфографии", covering over 130 pages. The author's investigations have their antecedents here, too, from the classics of Slavic studies (Jagic, Sreznevskij, Sachmatov) through Durnovo up to the English Slavicist H.G. Lunt and further on (the bibliography goes up to 1980, but some fresher works are not excluded either). In our view, however, I. H. Toth has been able to do the work of a pioneer even in this field with his systematic method of investigation that has 1 Although this is undoubtedly true, the paradigm of the u-stems and their influence on other stems was much more of CS character in the 11th c. (cf. Ф.П. Филин. Происхождение русского, украинского и белорусского языков. Л., "Наука", 1972, с. 366 и след.) than later, when, e.g., the -ови-type forms of Dat. sing, moved gradually to the West. According to a short statistical survey compiled by the author of this review, in the Codex Marianus there are 23 different nouns not belonging to the u-stems that take the -они ending in 101 cases (П. Лили. К вопросу о существительных с основой на -u. — Studia Slavica, XIX. 1973, p. 204). 197 been carried out consequently for all the 10 manuscripts. One quality of the work lies in the manysided study of the use of the jçs letters and their mixing with the characters denoting 'clear' (de-nasalised) u and a sounds. Their etymological and inetymological occurrence is documented and supported by exact statistical data certifying the frequency of the use of one or the other of them in a given context of letters (— phonemes), taking into account even their morphemic placement. All these data contribute to a more exact chronologization and localization of the manuscripts studied and promote the definition of their possible protographs. Here, of course, there is no place to review every detail , of this problem, but the statistics make it clear that the use of the letters mentioned above is much more frequently inetymological than correct. What has been said above refers equally to the jer's. The most important statement here seems to be that the manuscripts with one jer contain a relatively few number of russianisms and, consequently, one of the most important changes in the history of Russian spelling was the transition from the one-jer school to the two-jer one. Concerning the use of the pre-iotated letters two groups are set up. In one of them (the Ostromir Gospel, the two Svjatoslav Collections) the stock is full. On the other hand, none of the 10 manuscripts studied have this feature, it is thé letter HA that is most frequently dropped. The most consistent monument in this respect is the Reims Gospel eliminating even the characters to and ha. which are well preserved in the other 9 manuscripts. This seemingly radical orthographic reform of the Reims Gospel, however, may also have emerged under the influence of a very archaic protograph — as can be read on p. 170 — which may have lacked the whole stock of pre-iotated letters as the ancient version of the Cyrillic alphabet certainly did. The complicated nature of this question is underlined also by' the fact that the Reims Gospel is archaic in its use of the jer's but, nevertheless, contains several Russian linguistic features. So it is not an enviable situation to find oneself in wishing to define the relatively exact time and place that one or the other language monument was written or copied. I think that real linguistic (phonetic, morphological) data can render a more reliable source for this, simply because the special literature is much wider and voluminous in this field. Not too many scholars have taken the risk of dealing with the laborious tasks of palaeography. The 3rd and 4th chapters of the book are made up of the analysis of the linguistic material rendered by the 11th century russianized OB manuscripts. Some of these phonetic and 198 morphological russianisms have already been mentioned above. Special attention should be paid to the author's statement, according to which the reduced vowels are present both in strong and weak positions. It is sometimes only diacritic signs that refer to the possible lack of the reduced vowels in the protographs, but the OR scribe felt 'obliged' to note their absence, since he used them in his vernacular in all positions (cf. m'Nor-z). This feature makes the 11th c. the most probable time of emergence of the manuscripts. The problem of the tbrt group is also closely connected with that of the reduced vowels. The majority of the manuscripts studied show the OB tibt version, whereas the Life of Thekla, the Dubrovskij Menology and the Byckov Psalter show the overwhelming or exclusive use of tbrt or even tbrbt. ъ is usually in its etymological place, though even at this early stage its mixing with e (especially in the Dat. sing, of personal pronouns, e.g. тане, and in the reflection of the CS group tert, cf. сред-) can be observed. Following Durnovo and Gerta Hiittl-Folter, I. H. Toth uses the term 'full vocalism' not in its phonetic but rather in its lexicological sense. The ecclesiastic style and the OB protographs do not let the OR forms leak through. There are only two exceptions: the vepec version of the preposition vpt^-z and the 'pseudo-full-vocalic' серевро. To preserve conciseness, here we turn the reader's attention only to those phonetic and morphological points which are considered by the author to show an especially advanced stage of russification as, e.g., *dj -» ж, epenthetic 1, the Instr. sing. ending, the -ть ending in the 3rd pers. sing, and plur. of verbs, the contracted forms of the imperfect. It must be born in mind, however, that these features are characteristic of the manuscripts to a different extent. This is, perhaps, the basic thought of I. H. Toth's work: some of the sporadic russianisms emerging; so to say, by chance in the first half of the 11th c. changed into a norm as time passed, their use became systematic, i.e. the way of OB language monuments led from "русский извод" (Russian recension) to "русская редакция" (Russian edition). I. H. Toth is very convincing in proving this point, and it is this novelty that makes his work worthy of scientific recognition and acknowledgement. P. Lieli 

Imre Thót: Russkaâ redakciâ drevnebolgarskogo âzyka v konce XI načale XII vv.

http://acta.bibl.u-szeged.hu/1347/1/dissert_slav_ling_022_195-198.pdf

Imre Thót: Russkaâ redakciâ drevnebolgarskogo âzyka v konce XI načale XII vv.

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