The earliest East Slavic manuscripts serve to inform and to check scholars' understanding and reconstruction of the language spoken in the land of the Rus, as well as of its immediate predecessor, Proto-Slavic. Such reconstruction, however, depends critically on a proper understanding of the nature of the manuscripts and the process of their production. In the present section we discuss the work of two scholars, Horace G. Lunt and Charles E. Gribble, whose insights into the study of manuscripts elucidate some of the problems and pitfalls of manuscript interpretation.
Linguistics seeks to describe language as a system. In the general case, that system comprises sound. The written word provides but an imperfect representation of that sound. Spelling mistakes abound, but far from being a hindrance, they often assist the linguist's task. Spelling mistakes provide clues to actual pronunciation, which may in fact differ from the the sounds a specific sequence of letters might suggest. To wit, if a writer is unsure of the spelling of a word, he or she will make a guess. That guess will, in turn, be informed by the writer's own pronunciation. The writer will choose the sequence of letters which he or she thinks represents the desired sound.
Historical linguistics seeks to describe the evolution of the system of a given language or languages over time. Describing the evolution of languages requires an understanding of both the starting point and the end point of the period under consideration. The description of the end point, relatively speaking, is usually a simple matter: it is typically a modern language, whose characteristics can be confirmed via recourse to native speakers. The starting point, by comparison, comprises some unique difficulties: frequently it is an ancient language, with no remaining native speakers. Accurate description of linguistic evolution requires a priori an accurate description of the starting point, i.e. of the original ancient language. The scholar must therefore reconstruct from the available materials the linguistic system of the ancient language in question. One fundamental aspect of this description is an adequate reconstruction of the phonological system.
Frequently it happens that the ancient language texts which most concern the historical linguist come from the earliest documentary period of that language. Such texts are frequently contemporaneous with, or follow shortly upon, the invention of the writing system employed or the importation of a foreign writing system and its original application to the language under investigation. In such instances the writing system is often novel enough to the writers of the texts that there is as yet no sense of "correct spelling": the writing system has been invented or imported precisely to represent the sounds of the language as uttered. Spelling therefore has not yet been systematized, and the writer spells essentially phonetically. In such situations, when the linguist finds spellings which differ between two authors, this is assumed to arise as a result of differences in pronunciation.
The preceding provides a caricature of the logic underlying the reconstruction of ancient phonemic systems through the careful analysis of spellings and misspellings in historical documents. However it overlooks some subtleties which can lead to erroneous conclusions, particularly in the reconstruction of the language of the texts and speakers of early East Slavic. The crucial ingredient often left out of analyses is this: any writing system is first and foremost a system. As such, it must be learned; to be learned, it must conform to rules. The very process of learning the system immediately generates notions of convention, or more loosely "correctness". The writer's desire to adhere to convention may interfere with the tendency to write phonetically, even when guessing the spelling of a word. This should, as a result, give the linguist a sense of caution before accepting any particular spelling as a representation of the underlying phonetic reality (Lunt, 1951). Based upon these considerations, the eminent scholar Horace G. Lunt outlines two basic principles that must be applied when interpreting documentary evidence (Lunt, 1987):
Within the tradition of Old Russian, i.e. of early East Slavic, the writing system was adopted from the South Slavic area of the alphabet's invention. Moreover early documents such as the Ostromir Gospel were generally based on Old Church Slavonic models. The linguistic variation exhibited by the texts will therefore fall into three basic types (Lunt, 1987):
This variation may result from geographic distance, i.e. regional dialectal variation, or from temporal distance, i.e. evolution within the language in situ. Incorrect assignment of variation to one type or the other may lead to a faulty picture of the state of the language during any given period and its subsequent evolution (Lunt, 1987).
At the same time it is important to understand the perspective of the contemporaneous speaker. The preponderance of evidence surrounding the Moravian mission, as well as the reception of the liturgy among the East Slavs, suggests that East and South Slavs recognized no fundamental difference in the speech of their respective communities at the point in which the languages entered the historical written record. We may therefore tentatively assume that speakers in the tenth and eleventh centuries recognized any variation between their respective speech patterns as variation within one common language (Lunt, 1987).
The manuscript copyists themselves were professionals, or at the very least technicians. They had learned a detailed system and were employed to apply it. They assigned a notion of correctness to the system. In copying a manuscript, the copyist sought to reproduce the text. This however does not mean that the copyist sought to reproduce the spelling. Copyists often felt free to "correct" manuscripts. Naturally the notion of "correctness" could be informed by local pronunciation. But arguably more important was the influence of the learned system on the notion of "correctness". Lunt describes how Durnovo had earlier outlined the fundamental points underlying such considerations (Lunt, 1987):
Thus in the process of finding the correct spelling of a word, the Old Russian copyist would first have recourse to the rules of the system before possibly employing phonetic considerations. We find the same phenomenon in English: a writer schooled in the English writing system but at a loss for how to spell the plural of the particular would box would, all things being equal, be much more likely to guess boxes than *boxez, since the system itself contains no readily available instances of a plural written with final -z. The pattern established by the system frequently supersedes phonetic reasoning.
The task for the scholar, as Lunt explains, is therefore threefold (Lunt, 1987):
In this context, Lunt points out, forms reconstructed on linguistic grounds can serve as a guide to establishing the norms of scribal practice, but they need not provide a priori a rule for deciding what is "right" and what is "wrong" (Lunt, 1987).
The work of Gribble (1989) provides a concise and lucid account of a particular application of the principles described in the preceding section to problems of the linguistic interpretation of documentary evidence in Old Russian. We have seen that in early Slavic the jers were still vocalic, that is they could form the nucleus of a syllable. Moreover, if we judge correctness by our expectations based on etymological grounds, manuscripts originating in the regions of the early Rus generally write the jers as correctly as any other manuscript tradition in the early Slavic world until the middle of the 12th century. Nevertheless we frequently find that the scribe "drops" jers where they would otherwise be expected. The question therefore arises: what were the reasons for dropping the jers?
In a review of the literature surrounding the question, Gribble highlights four illustrative examples of the data contained in the early East Slavic manuscripts (Gribble, 1989):
Concerning the loss of jers in the initial syllables of кто and князь, Gribble makes the following observations. Though jer loss is frequent in initial syllables, scholars have little reason to believe that initial syllables had stress any weaker than other syllables not bearing the primary stress. This follows at least in part from the fact that early East Slavic still had the remnants of a tonal system inherited from Proto-Indo-European and still exhibited in certain members of the closely related Baltic family of languages (Gribble, 1989). The difference in stress between syllables in the earliest period of East Slavic was therefore likely minimal, and stress was in all probability not the deciding factor in the loss of jers in initial syllables.
The same considerations moreover suggest that jer loss in кто and князь was also not to be ascribed to the jers' pre-tonic position. Additionally, in other words showing a jer subject to loss, e.g. сътвор-, the stress frequently does not fall on the syllable immediately following the jer that can be dropped (Gribble, 1989).
The example of всь and днь, as Gribble points out, is important for discarding another hypothesis: that perhaps loss is essentially conditioned by the strong-versus-weak opposition of jers. In the instance of всь and днь, the jers dropped are precisely the strong jers, not the weak. Thus we may consider it unlikely that the strong-weak opposition of jers was the deciding factor in jer loss.
As we move to the remaining examples, we should keep in mind a particular fact of languages: they are idiosyncratic in the clusters of consonants that they "permit", that is the clusters that naturally appear as the result of historical evolution up to the epoch being described. As a simple example, English abhors an initial consonant cluster [kt], though it finds no particular problem pronouncing the cluster word-internally, as in tic-tock or backtalk. Classical Greek, by contrast, evidently did not bat an eyelash at initial [kt]: kteino: 'I kill'.
Gribble credits Markov and then Lunt with drawing attention to the consonant clusters that result due to jer loss (Gribble, 1989). In particular we find that сд, the cluster resulting from jer loss in съдє, was not a permitted cluster within early East Slavic. More specifically, Lunt had noted in work on the OCS Marianus manuscript that the consonant groups kt, čt, ps, pt are not found elsewhere in the language. Thus jer omission in a word such as кто would be interpreted phonemically as [kVto], with an interpolated vowel (Gribble, 1989). Gribble finally proposes that this serves to explain why jers are dropped in certain syllables and not in others. In particular, jers may be dropped when the resulting consonant cluster does not naturally occur within the language.
From the copyist's perspective, several factors would have contributed to such a tendency. Gribble outlines the following (Gribble, 1989):
Moreover, in the practice of copying manuscripts, scribal convention would have reinforced some consonant combinations as unproblematic. For example, as кто was already a frequent spelling, the sequence кт would not have alarmed the typical copyist. This would in turn make jer omission in къ тому unobjectionable. However where the consonant cluster that would result from jer loss could otherwise occur naturally, there was a strong tendency to retain jers. This happens for instance with the sequence сън-: both сън- and сн- could occur naturally in early East Slavic, and so the jer was therefore typically retained (Gribble, 1989).
Gribble's work provides an elegant example of how consideration of the scribe's perspective can complement linguistic understanding with the goal of explaining apparent anomalies. In the author's own words, "I would maintain that it is not a matter of ignoring the living pronunciation, but just the opposite: the living pronunciation was a factor that was taken for granted, which meant that no confusion could arise from the omission" (Gribble, 1989).
Our final selection relates the scene when Svjatopolk's henchmen finally catch up with Gleb on his futile voyage to his father's side. We leave off as Gleb implores his enemies to have mercy on his innocence.
43 - И сице ему стенющю и плачющюся, и сльзами землю омачающю, приспѣша вънезапу посъланӏи отъ Святопълка, зълыя его слугы, немилостивӏи кръвопӏицѣ, братоненавидьници люти зѣло, сверѣпа звѣри душю имѣюще.
44 - Святыи же поиде въ кораблици, и срѣтоша и усть Смядины.
45 - И яко узьрѣ я святыи, въздрадовася душею, а они узьрѣвъше и омрачаахуся и гребяху къ нему.
46 - А съ цѣлованӏя чаяаше отъ нихъ прӏяти.
47 - И яко быша равьно пловуще, начаша скакати зълӏи они въ лодӏю его, обнажены меча имуще въ рукахъ, бльщащася, акы вода.
48 - И абӏе вьсѣмъ весла отъ руку испадоша, и вьси отъ страха омьртвѣша.
49 - И си видѣвъ блаженыи, разумѣвъ, яко хотять его убити.
50 - Възьрѣвъ къ нимъ умиленама очима и сльзами лице си умывая, съкрушенъмь сьрдцьмь, съмѣренъмь разумъмь и частыимь въздыханӏемь вьсь сльзами разливаяся, а тѣлъмь утьрпая, жалостьно гласъ испущааше, "Не дѣите мене, братӏя моя милая и драгая!
51 - Не дѣите мене, ничто же вы зъла сътворивъша!
52 - Не брезѣте мене, братӏе и господье, не брезѣте!
53 - Кую обиду сътворихъ брату моему и вамъ, братӏе и господье мои?
54 - Аще ли кая обида, ведѣте мя къ князю вашему, а къ моему брату и господину.
55 - Помилуите уности моеѣ, помилуите, господье мои!
56 - Вы ми будѣте господие, азъ вашь рабъ.
57 - Не пожьнете мене, отъ житӏя не съзьрѣла!
58 - Не пожьнѣте класа, не уже съзьрѣвъша, нъ млеко бєзълобӏя носяща!
59 - Не порѣжете лозы, не до коньца въздрастъша, а плодъ имуща!
60 - Молю вы ся и милъ вы ся дѣю.
61 - Убоитеся рекъшааго усты апостольскы, "не дѣти бывайте умы, зълобӏемь же младеньствуите, а умы съвьршени бываите."
62 - Азъ, братӏе, и зълобӏемь и въздрастъмь еще младєньствую.
63 - Се нѣсть убӏйство, нъ сырорѣзанӏе.
43 И сице ему стенющю и плачющюся, и сльзами землю омачающю, приспѣша вънезапу посъланӏи отъ Святопълка, зълыя его слугы, немилостивӏи кръвопӏицѣ, братоненавидьници люти зѣло, сверѣпа звѣри душю имѣюще.
44 Святыи же поиде въ кораблици, и срѣтоша и усть Смядины. 45 И яко узьрѣ я святыи, въздрадовася душею, а они узьрѣвъше и омрачаахуся и гребяху къ нему. 46 А съ цѣлованӏя чаяаше отъ нихъ прӏяти. 47 И яко быша равьно пловуще, начаша скакати зълӏи они въ лодӏю его, обнажены меча имуще въ рукахъ, бльщащася, акы вода. 48 И абӏе вьсѣмъ весла отъ руку испадоша, и вьси отъ страха омьртвѣша. 49 И си видѣвъ блаженыи, разумѣвъ, яко хотять его убити. 50 Възьрѣвъ къ нимъ умиленама очима и сльзами лице си умывая, съкрушенъмь сьрдцьмь, съмѣренъмь разумъмь и частыимь въздыханӏемь вьсь сльзами разливаяся, а тѣлъмь утьрпая, жалостьно гласъ испущааше, "Не дѣите мене, братӏя моя милая и драгая! 51 Не дѣите мене, ничто же вы зъла сътворивъша! 52 Не брезѣте мене, братӏе и господье, не брезѣте! 53 Кую обиду сътворихъ брату моему и вамъ, братӏе и господье мои? 54 Аще ли кая обида, ведѣте мя къ князю вашему, а къ моему брату и господину. 55 Помилуите уности моеѣ, помилуите, господье мои! 56 Вы ми будѣте господие, азъ вашь рабъ. 57 Не пожьнете мене, отъ житӏя не съзьрѣла! 58 Не пожьнѣте класа, не уже съзьрѣвъша, нъ млеко бєзълобӏя носяща! 59 Не порѣжете лозы, не до коньца въздрастъша, а плодъ имуща! 60 Молю вы ся и милъ вы ся дѣю. 61 Убоитеся рекъшааго усты апостольскы, "не дѣти бывайте умы, зълобӏемь же младеньствуите, а умы съвьршени бываите." 62 Азъ, братӏе, и зълобӏемь и въздрастъмь еще младєньствую. 63 Се нѣсть убӏйство, нъ сырорѣзанӏе.
43 And while he was mourning and weeping so, wetting the ground with his tears, the dispatch from Svjatopolk suddenly approached, his evil servants, a bloodthirsty, unmerciful (group), an exceedingly ferocious (bunch of) brother-haters, possessing the soul of a wild beast.
44 And the holy one set out in the caravel, and they met him at the mouth of the Smjadina. 45 And as the holy one caught sight of them, he rejoiced in his soul; but as they saw him, they grew dark and rowed toward him. 46 He expected to receive greetings from them. 47 But as they sailed up alongside, those evil men began to leap into his boat, holding in their hands unsheathed swords, glistening like the water. 48 And immediately the oars slipped from everyone's hands, and they all froze with fear. 49 The blessed one saw these things, and understood that they wanted to kill him. 50 Having looked to them with pitiful eyes, and washing his face with tears, with a shattered heart, with dispirited mind, with deep sighs, pouring himself all over with tears, becoming weak in body, sorrowfully he uttered a sound, "Do not touch me, my poor, dear brothers! 51 Do not touch me, who has done you no harm! 52 Let me be, brothers and lords, let me be! 53 What injustice have I done to my brother and you, my brethren and lords? 54 If there is some injustice, then lead me to your prince, and to my brother and lord. 55 Have mercy for my youth, have mercy, my lords! 56 Be my masters, and I your servant. 57 Do not cut me down, having not yet ripened with age! 58 Do not harvest this ear of corn, not yet ripened, still bearing the milk of innocence! 59 Cut not this vine, not yet having grown to term, still bearing fruit! 60 I beseech you and humble myself before you. 61 Heed the one who, with the mouth of the apostle, said, 'Be not children in mind, rather be children with malice, and be matured in mind.' 62 I, brethren, am yet a child in both malice and age. 63 This is not murder, but child-killing."
The infinitive and supine are verbal nouns. The infinitive takes the ending -ти and generally corresponds to the 'to X' form of a verb 'X' in English: for example to do, the infinitive form of the verb do. The supine takes the ending -тъ and in general corresponds to 'in order to X' for a verb 'X' in English. These forms are frozen, invariable forms: they do not change depending on function or grammatical relationships within a clause.
As the endings of the infinitive and supine are affixed to various verbal stems, the final phonemes of those stems frequently undergo phonetic changes. The following chart lists the most common changes, along with illustrative examples.
|Articulation||Shift||Early CS||Late CS||Old Russian||OCS||Meaning|
|Velar||*-k-ti > -чи||*tek-ti||тєчи||тєшти||to flow|
|*-g-ti > -чи||*mog-ti||мочи||мошти||to be able|
|Dental||*-t-ti > -сти||*met-ti||мєсти||мєсти||to throw|
|*-d-ti > -сти||*sěd-ti||сѣсти||сѣсти||to sit|
|Labial||*-p-ti > -ти||*sup-ti||сути||сѹти||to heap up|
|*-b-ti > -ти||*greb-ti||грєти||грєти||to bury|
|Glide||*-v-ti > -ти||*živ-ti||жити||жити||to live|
|*-j-ti > -ти||*ob-uj-ti||об-ути||об-ѹти||to put shoes on|
|*-ĭj-ti > -ити||*bĭj-ti||бити||бити||to beat|
|*-ŭj-ti > -ыти||*mŭj-ti||мыти||мъӏти||to wash|
|Nasal||*-ĭm-ti > -яти||*vŭz-ĭm-ti||*vŭz-ę-ti||въз-яти||въз-ѧти||to take|
|TorT||*TerT > TereT||*mer-ti||мєрєти||мрѣти||to die|
With the supine, the change *-k-t- > -č- generally fronts the following back jer -ъ to -ь. Thus the supine of тєчи 'to flow' would be тєчь, with final front jer. Similarly for the shift *-g-t- > -č-.
Where the above chart shows a shift resulting simply in -ти, this signifies that the preceding phoneme suffered deletion. For example the shift *-p-ti > -ти shows that a root-final *-p was deleted before the infinitive ending. In the rows illustrating the phonetic changes undergone by the glides, we see that final *-v- and *-j- are lost before the infinitive and supine suffixes, except when -j- is preceded by a jer. In this scenario, the presence of the glide leads to tense position for the preceding jer and the typical shift encountered in tense position. Note also that the final row displaying the shift for TerT combinations is meant to be illustrative of all TorT-style shifts, as discussed in Section 7.3.
The infinitive derives from an original Indo-European nominal formation in *-ti-, generally used to create abstract nouns from verbs. Compare Sansrkit prajn'atis and Greek gno:sis (-sis from earlier -tis) with Old Russian and OCS abstract noun познать 'knowledge' built from the same abstract formation. The particular shape of the Slavic infinitive derives from the dative form of this abstract noun: *-tej > -ти in Old Russian and OCS.
As a noun, the infinitive generally provides a complement to some other finite verb form. The exact nature of the complement may vary: the infinitive may denote purpose, necessity, possibility, etc. The subject of the main verb of the clause is often understood as the subject of the infinitive: нъ хощю вы почьстити 'I want to honor you' (Primary Chronicle), where the subject I of the verb хощю is understood also as subject of the infinitive почьстити. When the subject of the infinitive differs from the subject of the main verb, Old Russian typically puts the subject of the infinitive in the dative case: тѣхъ бо пророци прорицаху яко Богу родитися 'For their prophets prophecied that God was to be born' (Primary Chronicle). The direct object of the infinitive, by contrast, generally takes the accusative as with any finite verb; when the verb is negated, this object is frequently cast in the genitive. In addition Old Russian frequently employs the infinitive in impersonal constructions which have the force of a command. For example: свинины нє ясти и вина нє пити 'One should not eat pork nor drink wine' (Primary Chronicle), but more literally 'it is not to eat pork and to drink wine'. Here свинины and вина are direct objects of the respective infinitives, but they take the genitive case as a result of the negation.
The supine derives from an original Indo-European nominal formation in *-tu-. Compare Latin adven-tus 'coming, arrival', an abstract noun built to the Latin verb ad-veni:re 'to come, arrive'. As the Latin supine corresponds to the accusative case of this nominal construction (Lat. adventum), so too does the suffix -тъ of the Old Russian supine, with loss of the final consonant and reduction of the short *-u.
As a frozen accusative, the supine finds a natural use as a direct object or as the destination of directed motion. In fact within Old Russian the supine quickly became specialized as a manner of expressing a goal with finite verbs expressing or implying motion. For example, we find in the Primary Chronicle: посъла Ольгъ мужа своя построитъ мира 'Oleg sent his men in order to arrange peace...'. Whereas the infinitive generally takes the direct object in the accusative (in the absence of negation), we see with this example the general tendency of Old Russian to place the object of the action denoted by the supine in the genitive, regardless of whether the action is negated or not. From the perspective of English, this becomes natural if we make sure to highlight the original nominal character of the supine. For example we may rephrase the last example as follows to elicit a parallel construction with the object in the genitive in English: 'Oleg sent his men for the arranging of peace'.
Thus the uniqueness of the supine lies not in the structure of its arguments, i.e. how its objects are denoted. Its novelty lies instead in providing a formal accusative (superficially a 'direct object', though not all accusatives need be direct objects) for verbs which are typically intransitive, namely verbs of motion: приходиша отъ Рима ѹцитъ васъ 'they came from Rome in order to teach you', or more literally '... for the teaching of you'. Here the verb приходиша 'they came' is intransitive and so cannot take a direct object. But fundamentally the supine, as an accusative, does not denote the direct object; rather it denotes the goal of the motion (cf. the discussion of the original senses of the accusative in Section 3).
Old Russian texts display numerous instances in which the present participle does not agree with its referent in some combination of gender, case, or number. One of the clearest examples of this comes in the Primary Chronicle's story of Olga's Revenge: идуще же єму въспѧть размъӏсливъ рече дружинѣ своєи 'Having gone back (and) having considered he said to his retinue...'. Here we find the nominative plural masculine form идуще of the present participle where we would expect the dative singular masculine идущу to modify єму in a dative absolute (which nevertheless is not absolute, since єму refers to the subject of рече). Consider also the following passage from the Igor Tale: здрави князи, и дружина, побарая за христьаны на поганыя полки 'May the princes, and the retinue, prosper fighting for the Christians against the pagan troops'. Here the masculine nominative singular побарая 'fighting' modifies the masculine plural князи 'the princes', and simultaneously the feminine nominative singular дружина 'the retinue'. Such frozen forms become ever more common as time marches on. Though other forms occur, when we find such a mismatch between the present participle and its referent, most frequently the participle shows the masculine nominative form, singular or plural. This provides the point of departure for what in modern Russian grammars is termed the gerund, a sort of adverbial usage of the participle. Such gerunds provide a background action without demanding agreement of gender, number, or case. Some verbs so frequently fill this role that, much later in the language, the gerund takes on the role of a simple conjunction: e.g. хотя 'although', in origin the gerund based on the present participle of хотѣти 'to want, wish'.
The fifth conjugation, almost paradoxically, comprises a marginal class of critical verbs. The verbs which belong to Class V derive from verbs originally athematic in the present tense. By athematic we mean that no thematic vowel (either *-e- or *-o-) intervened between root and ending: the endings were affixed directly to the verbal root itself, or a suffixed extension thereof. The athematic conjugation was already ceding ground to the increasingly pervasive thematic conjugation within Common Slavic itself, and even to some extent within the parent Proto-Indo-European. It seems that the centrality of the Class V verbs within the lexicon -- encompassing such notions as 'be', 'give', 'see', and 'eat' -- assisted their retention into the historical period and beyond.
Perhaps the most unique feature of the fifth conjugation as a whole is the characteristic first person singular desinence of the present tense: -мь, from an original PIE *-mĭ as evidenced in Greek dido:mi and Sanskrit dada:mi, both 'I give' and reduplicated presents built to the same root which gives Old Russian дамь 'I give'. In fact, the stem дад- of дати 'to give' is itself reduplicated, meaning that the initial consonant of the root, together with a vowel, were prefixed to the root itself much as any other verbal prefix within Old Russian. This reduplication, however, dates back to the proto-language and was no longer a productive verbal formation even within Common Slavic. However the fact that the stem was formed via reduplication and therefore resulted in a stem-final -д- within Common Slavic had important implications for the conjugation of this particular verb: though the final -д- drops before a following -м- or -с-, the stem-final -д- becomes -с- before -т-. This leads to the stem-final -с- characteristic of several forms, such as дасть 'he gives' and дастє 'you (pl.) give'. The stem-final -д- is retained before vowels, as in дадять 'they give', from CS *dad-nti > *dad-ętĭ > Old Russian дадять, but OCS дадѧтъ.
The same changes found between the stem of дати 'to give' and the following desinence occur also in the verb ѣсти 'to eat', with stem ѣд-, and in вѣдѣти 'to see', with stem вѣд-. We list the changes in the following table for convenience.
|Shift||Early CS||Late CS||Old Russian||OCS||Meaning|
|*-d-t- > -ст-||*dad-ti||*dastĭ||дасть||дастъ||he gives|
|*-d-s- > -с-||*dad-si:||*dassi||даси||даси||thou givest|
|*-d-m- > -м-||*dad-mus||*dadmŭ||дамъ||дамъ||we give|
The verb быти 'to be' shows numerous idiosyncrasies. The present stem itself is ѥс-. This derives from PIE *Hes-, with initial laryngeal. The zero-grade of this PIE root is therefore *Hs-. Though the laryngeal was not retained into Common Slavic, the resulting structure of the root interacted notably with the athematic endings. Compare in the following chart the evolution of the full- and zero-grade forms as exhibited by the first person singular and third person plural.
|PIE||Early CS||Late CS||Old Russian||OCS||Meaning|
We see that in the third person plural, the zero-grade of the root left the root-final *-s- as the initial element of the verb form itself, and the nasal of the ending *-nti, helped by the insertion of a thematic vowel, provided the vocalic element. This explains the unique shape of the third person plural form суть. The same process applies to the present active participle. Moreover, the initial є- of the majority of the present forms combined with the final -є of the negative particle нє to give the vowel -ѣ- in the majority of the negated forms such as нѣсть 'is not'. This coalescence of vowels did not occur in the third person plural, however, due to the lack of a verb-initial -є, and so the resulting form is нєсуть 'they are not'. The reader must take care to distinguish this form from the third person plural нєсуть 'they carry' from the verb нєсти 'to carry'.
The verb быти 'to be' is the only Old Russian verb to have a separate future-tense stem: буд-. The stem takes the endings proper to the thematic verbal conjugations. Thus буду 'I will be', etc.
In addition the verb быти 'to be' shows two different formations of the imperfect, as well as two different formations of the aorist. Some scholars label the forms бѣахъ, etc., the imperfective imperfect, while the forms будяахъ, etc., receive the label perfective imperfect. The terminology derives from the fact that, across much of Slavic, the perfective verbal aspect typically denotes the future in the absence of a separate morphological future tense. Since the stem буд- serves as the future of быти 'to be', the imperfect built from that stem naturally falls under the heading of perfective. By analogy, the aorist forms бѣхъ, etc., fall under the heading of imperfective aorist, and so the forms быхъ, etc., receive the title perfective aorist.
The verb ѣсти 'to eat' shows two stems in the aorist: a long stem ѣд- and a short stem я-. There seems to be no clear distinction of perfectivity or imperfectivity between the two stems.
The following chart lists the forms of the Class V verbs: быти 'to be', дати 'to give', вѣдѣти 'to see', and ѣсти 'to eat'.
|1 Sg.||ѥсмь, ѥсми||дамь, дами||вѣдѣ, вѣмь, вѣми||ѣмь, ѣми|
|1 Sg.||нѣсмь, нѣсми||-||-||-|
|2||будь, буди||дажь||вѣжь||ѣжь, ѣжи|
|3||будь, буди||дажь||вѣжь||ѣжь, ѣжи|
|Pres. Act. Part.|
|Pres. Pass. Part.|
|Masc. N||-||дадомъ||вѣдомъ, вѣдимъ||ѣдомъ|
|New Aorist I|
|3||бѣ||да, дасть||вѣдѣ, вѣстъ||ѣстъ|
|New Aorist II|
|Past Act. Part.|
|Past Pass. Part.|
Three verbs provide a perennial source of confusion for learners of Old Russian and Old Church Slavonic. The confusion arises not only from the similarity of their forms, but also from the overlap in their meanings: имѣти 'to have'; имати 'to have, take'; яти 'to take, seize'. Adding to the confusion is the fact that two of the three verbs form the present tense in two distinct ways. Consider the following chart.
|Infinitive||Meaning||1 Sg. Pres. I||2 Sg. Pres. I||1 Sg. Pres. II||2 Sg. Pres. II|
The verb имѣти 'to have' shows in the form имамь the hallmark of conjugation according to Class V, while the alternate form имѣю shows the signs of the Class III conjugation with the thematic vowel preceded by the palatal glide. The verb имати 'to have, take' likewise shows the characteristics of Class III conjugation in both present conjugations, ѥмлю and имаю, though the latter adds a suffix to the basic root which is absent in the former. Finally яти forms its present, иму, etc., according to Class IA.
The explanation for the similarity in form and meaning lies in the fact that all three verbs, while separate within Old Russian, derive from the same Proto-Indo-European root: PIE *Hem- 'take', cf. Latin emere 'buy'. In Common Slavic the root became *ĭm-. In initial position the front jer developed a palatal on-glide, *jĭm-, and in early Slavic orthography the only available spelling was им-. To this were added various suffixes to derive secondary verbs имѣти 'to have' and имати 'to have, take'. Adding the infinitive ending directly to the root resulted in the evolution CS *ĭm-ti > *ę-ti > *jęti > Old Russian яти, OCS ѩти 'to take, seize'. Moreover the palatal glide which precedes the thematic vowel of Class III verb softens the *-m-, so that *jem-je-ši, showing full grade of the root, becomes ѥмлѥши.
The following table provides a reference for distinguishing the forms of these closely related verbs.
|Meaning||have||have, take||take, seize|
|Pres. Act. Part.|
|Pres. Act. Part. II|
|Pres. Pass. Part.|
|Past Act. Part.|
|Masc./Neut. N||имѣвъ||имавъ||имъ, явъ|
|Past Pass. Part.|
Contrary to the non-past paradigm, of which Old Russian exhibits only one formation, the past tense paradigm shows two distinct formations: the aorist and imperfect. As with the non-past, these formations are morphological categories. Each category employs a special set of verbal endings. These endings carry different information for the two different categories: though they both mark an action as happening in past time, and hence are past tenses, the depiction of the action's evolution over time differs between the two. We discuss these differences in more detail below.
In Old Russian the morphology of the aorist tense provides a simple past tense. First and foremost, the aorist is a past tense, and therefore marks an event as having happened before the time frame of the utterance. But the aorist combines the notion of past time with a secondary connotation: use of the aorist marks that an event occurred, but it foregoes any implications as to whether the actual event involved a period of time over which it evolved, whether it was instantaneous, or any other connotation as to its temporal profile. This parallels the English simple past, as in the use of ate in I ate my dinner. In this phrase the verb does not point to the process by which the dinner was eaten; it does not elaborate as to whether the process took place over time or was nearly instantaneous. Within scholarly discussions one often finds the aorist described as marking events in "point-like" fashion; this in contrast to the imperfect, where there is some connotation of (perhaps line-like) extent in time. Consider the following examples of the aorist as a simple past.
Because of this simple, point-like view of events, authors of Old Russian narrative texts often use the aorist to order a sequence of events: with proper adverbs and connectives, authors employ the aorist to denote which event happened first, second, etc. Consider the following examples of the aorist to narrate a sequence of events.
The point-like nature of the aorist, combined with the fact that it is a past tense, imply that the event denoted by the aorist has been completed before the time of the utterance, or before the time frame established by context. However in some instances of aorist usage, context would seem to dictate that the emphasis is on the present result of the completed action denoted by the aorist. In such instances the aorist seems to overlap in sense with the perfect, or when the context appears to be in past time, with the pluperfect. Consider the following examples in which the aorist seems to serve as perfect or pluperfect.
Like the aorist tense, the Old Russian imperfect tense is a morphological past tense. But in contrast to the aorist, which marks events without reference to their extent in time, a secondary connotation of the imperfect in Old Russian is that the action in question extended over a period of time. Thus the imperfect tense both places an action in past time and makes explicit reference to its extent in past time. This parallels English usage of the continuous past, as with the verb was eating in the sentence I was eating my dinner. Consider the following examples of the imperfect tense denoting a continuous, extended event.
The imperfect also finds a use in denoting repeated past-time events. That is, some events by their nature or by context are of short duration. With such actions the imperfect may mark a period in past time in which the short-duration events recurred numerous (though usually an unspecified number of) times. This is akin to the use of the continuous past in English phrases like For years I was signing my name illegibly. Each particular signature was an action of short duration, and so the overall connotation of such an expression is that the speaker repeatedly signed his or her name illegibly. This also overlaps with English usage of the collocation used to to denote a past action which was customary over a period of time: I always used to sign my name illegibly. Consider the following examples of the Old Russian imperfect denoting repeated past events.
Finally we occasionally find that Old Russian uses the imperfect to mark a hypothetical situation, often contrary to fact. This may occur where Old Russian might otherwise employ the conditional-optative construction, as discussed in Section 27. As in that section, we see in Old Russian the tendency to replace irrealis moods by past indicatives. This parallels English, where for example the pluperfect finds use in contrafactual statements: If only I had called ahead.... Note the following example of the use of the imperfect for a hypothetical construction: не лѣпо ли ны бяшеть, братӏе, начати старыми словєсы трудныхъ повѣстӏй о полку игоревѣ, игоря святъславича 'Would it not be fitting, brothers, to begin with the ancient words of the toilsome exploits concerning the Igorian troop, of Igor son of Svjatoslav?' (Igor Tale).
In our discussion of the past tenses in Old Russian (Section 49) we only told half the story. When we said that the aorist and imperfect are past tenses, this is only half right. In fact they are morphological categories each of which combines two logically independent grammatical features: tense and aspect. Tense, as we have mentioned, is the grammatical feature which places events in time relative to the moment of utterance. With tense we make distinctions of present, past, and future. Tense places events relative to one another on a timeline. Aspect, by contrast, is a completely separate notion, which we will discuss briefly below.
Aspect denotes what many scholars term the shape of the action, or its temporal profile. To see these contrasts in practice, let us consider some examples from English. In particular we focus on events in the past tense: English distinguishes between certain aspects most clearly in the past tense, and by fixing the tense we can remove tense as a factor in our considerations of aspect. When we say I floated, we describe the past action of floating in a way that says nothing about the temporal extent of the process: we consider the event as a single point on the timeline. By contrast, when we say I was floating, we are also describing a past action; but this time the use of the past continuous form was floating makes specific reference to the fact that the event occurred over a period of time. We may imagine that, rather than identifying a point on the timeline, this identifies an interval of time. In fact this particular form does not make clear whether the action has ceased or not by the time of the utterance, whereas I floated makes clear that the event began and ended all prior to the moment of utterance. In the parlance of aspect, we say that I floated describes the event with perfective aspect, while I was floating describes the event with imperfective aspect. The morphology of English signals a change of aspect: the simple past expresses perfective aspect, while the continuous past expresses imperfective aspect. We may apply this morphology to any verb: I bought (the car) (perfective) vs. I was buying (the car) (imperfective). Note that in the phrase I was buying the car, it is unclear whether the purchase was actually concluded or not, while the phrase I bought the car makes it clear that ownership of the automobile did in fact change hands.
But aspect need not be signaled simply by morphology. Aspect can be a characteristic proper to the inherent meaning of a word, so-called lexical aspect. For example, English shoot is necessarily perfective lexically: by its very nature the verb describes an instantaneous action, where beginning and end of an individual instance of the action are so tightly bound as to be imagined almost as co-occurring. Being an English verb, however, we may conjugate it however we like: in the past tense we may say either I shot or I was shooting. The simple past I shot employs the morphologically perfective form that coincides with the lexical aspect of the verb to relate a single, past-time instance of the action. However the continuous past I was shooting mixes morphological imperfectivity with lexical perfectivity to arrive at a unique combination: I was shooting denotes a sequence of individually perfective actions, one shot after another over an extended period of time. Compare this to the English verb redden, which is not inherently perfective. We may use either past tense conjugation, either Her cheeks reddened or Her cheeks were reddening, with no special change of interpretation between the two different morphological aspects.
The Old Russian aorist and imperfect are both past tenses, but the distinction between the two is one of aspect: they parallel the English simple and continuous pasts, respectively. But as with the preceding examples, they can interact with the lexical aspect of roots to lead to more intricate interpretations. Moreover, Slavic in general, and Old Russian in particular, possessed means of modifying the actual lexical aspect of verbs via changes of suffixes and prefixes, thus allowing the possibility for any verb to have two associated lexical entries, one inherently perfective (like English shoot), the other inherently imperfective (like English redden). We discuss some of these modifications below.
Old Russian displays numerous morphological features which allow the language to modify the aspect of a given verbal root. One method employs the addition of suffixes to the verbal root, and in this Old Russian displays a tendency common to many of the Indo-European languages. In the literature on Slavic languages scholars tend to call this process derivation, and typically the result is that the suffixed verb shows imperfective aspect where the original root shows perfective aspect. Another mechanism by which Old Russian modifies aspect, and one which grows into an ever more robust and pervasive system as we approach modern Russian, is that of prefixation. Typically the addition of a verbal prefix will result in a perfective verb where the root is originally imperfective. The following table displays different types of aspectual correspondences (Schenker, 1995).
|Type||Imperfective Type||Perfective Type||Imperfective Example||Perfective Example||Meaning|
Discussions of perfectivity in the context of modern Russian often allude to the fact that a perfective action, inasmuch as it is viewed as a complete whole with beginning and end included, is incongruous with the notion of a continuous present tense: something that is ongoing at the time of utterance by definition has not finished, and so cannot be viewed as a completed whole. This provides a logical point of departure for a feature of modern Russian: perfective verbs conjugated in the present tense generally have future meaning.
Frequently scholars project this feature of modern Russian back to the period of Old Russian. While the texts often allow for such an interpretation, we nevertheless find notable exceptions to the equation between perfective presents and future meaning. Consider the following example (cf. Schmalstieg, 1995, p. 142; Miklosich, 1860, Section IV, p. 3): изъ тогождє лѣса тєчєть Волга на въстокъ, и вътєчєть сєдмию дєсятъ жрѣлъ въ морє хвалисьскоѥ 'From the same forest the Volga flows to the east, and it flows into the Caspian Sea with seventy mouths' (Primary Chronicle). Here in describing the geography of the region, a future interpretation would be the least likely for the verb вътєчєть 'flows into'. However if we were simply to assume that the Old Russian system of verbal aspect functions equivalently to that of modern Russian, we would be forced to conclude that вътєчєть is perfective by virtue of being prefixed; and since it is a prefixed verb in the present tense, it should as a result have future meaning. The example above makes clear that we must be more nuanced with our attempts to tease out the aspect of Old Russian verbs.
Some verbs seem to show more reliably a particular aspectual value, such as дати 'to give', which is generally deemed perfective. Moreover, some suffixes seem to derive perfective verbs from imperfective roots. One of the more consistent of these suffixes is -ну- (cf. OCS -нѫ-). Stems with this nasal suffix generally appear to be perfective, as the following example suggests (Ostromir Gospel, Matthew 24.29, cf. Sreznevskij, 1893, vol. 2, p.282; Matthews, 1960, p.204).
|Chapter||Ostromir Gospel||Greek Text||English Translation|
|Matthew 24.29a||слъньце мрькнеть||ho he:lios skotisthe:setai||the sun shall be darkened|
|Matthew 24.29b||и луна не дасть свѣта||kai he: sele:ne: ou do:sei to pheggos aute:s||and the moon shall give no light|
Here we see that the present tense forms of both дати 'to give' and мрькнути 'to become dark' both translate future tense forms in the Greek. As mentioned in our discussion of the non-past (Section 45), this could merely result from the fact that Old Russian has no simple morphological future, and the present tense forms could function as a future in the same way as the English continuous present in, e.g., I am leaving tomorrow. However other similar examples, as well as lexical pairing with derived imperfective forms, suggest that instances of the -ну- suffix do in fact correspond generally to perfective verbs.
Some of the suffixes found in Old Russian for deriving imperfective verbs from perfective ones likely extend back into the Common Slavic period. Chief among these suffixes was -a-j-. This could be added to a perfective stem to result in an imperfective stem. When preceded by an intervocalic -j-, the -j- was often replaced by the labial glide -v- before adding the -a-j- suffix. In the instance of verbs from the -i- class, before the -a-j- suffix the -i- became the glide -j- and generally triggered j-palatalization of the preceding consonant. With verbs exhibiting the -nu- suffix, the -nu- suffix itself generally dropped before addition of -a-j-. Moreover the suffix -ov-a- seems also to have been used to derive imperfectives from perfectives. The following chart shows various examples of derivation via the suffixes -a-j- and -ov-a- in the instance of different original root formations (Schenker, 1995).
As we have seen above, the concepts of tense and aspect are logically distinct: tense speaks to the relative placement of actions on a timeline, while aspect describes its shape or extent along the timeline. But while these two concepts may be logically isolated, we must confront the fact that they do not appear in isolation in Old Russian or any other of the Slavic languages. Senn (1949) states:
|In Russian and Polish, aspect distinctions are not more essential than tense distinctions. The two systems belong together and are interlaced.|
The same applies to Old Russian, perhaps even more so because of the difficulty in understanding just how one might concretely assign a given aspectual value to a particular instance of a particular verb when no native speaker remains who may verify the assertion.
Bermel (1995) in particular points out that an approach to identifying Old Russian verbal aspect that relies too heavily on morphological characteristics will inevitably be plagued with difficulties. In particular he emphasizes the interplay of morphology with the lexical aspect displayed by the verbal roots themselves. The following chart provides the categories of lexical aspect outlined by Bermel (1995).
|Atelic||no explicit goal|
|Punctual||can be reduced to a single moment||видѣти||see|
|стрѣлити||fire a shot|
|Non-Punctual||cannot be reduced to a single moment||писати||write|
The above list of lexical aspects is by no means exhaustive. But it certainly isolates some of the major issues: does the action bring about a particular result? (Telic.) Does it denote a state or action with no discernable result? (Atelic.) And so forth. As we have seen above with the English example I was shooting, the interpretation of the phrase as a whole results from a unique mixture of lexical and morphological aspect. The context as a whole, therefore, must guide our understanding of both lexical and morphological aspect in Old Russian:
|Context can also influence how an act is perceived, and it is crucial to understanding O[ld]R[ussian] aspect. Instead of classifying OR forms directly as having "perfective" and "imperfective" meanings, a more fruitful approach is to describe the underlying contextual meanings reflected in the forms, and then to decide how and when these meanings map onto an OR aspectual paradigm (Bermel, 1995).|
In particular, we should seek whether certain forms of purported aspectual pairs of verbs tend to appear more frequently in certain contexts and with certain interpretations. By isolating such tendencies we may hope to ascertain information on the underlying aspectual distinction. Bermel (1995) provides an example of such methodology in the context of the Primary Chronicle. In particular, he illustrates the proposed opposition between a presumably root-perfective пасти 'to fall' and its derived imperfective partner падати 'to fall', as well as that between the presumably perfective поставити 'to place, appoint, build' and its derived imperfective partner поставлати, with the same meaning. Consider the following examples from the Laurentian Codex cited in Bermel (1995).
This illustrates the procedure by which one can correlate interpretation with aspectual value, given enough context to establish the correctness of the interpretation. In particular we find above that the interpretations support the assignment of perfective aspect to пасти and imperfective to падати, and similarly for поставити and поставлати, respectively. But the procedure must include enough data to establish a pattern: the interpretation and form must coincide regularly before any aspectual value can be determined with relative accuracy.