Morphological Features of the First Printed Gospels in Udmurt Cover Image

Морфологические особенности первых печатных Евангелий на удмуртском языке
Morphological Features of the First Printed Gospels in Udmurt

Author(s): Maria P. Bezenova
Subject(s): Morphology, Syntax, Historical Linguistics, South Slavic Languages, 19th Century
Published by: Институт языкознания Российской академии наук
Keywords: the Udmurt language; written record; Gospels; morphological features; Udmurt dialects;

Summary/Abstract: The article describes the morphological features of the first printed Gospels in the Udmurt language. These editions are the first longest coherent Udmurt texts, that is, they are one of the first sources for studying the formation of the morphological system of the standard Udmurt language. The paper describes the main grammatical categories of the noun (number, possessiveness, case) and verb (voice, mood, tense), as well as non-finite forms of the verb (infinitive, participle, gerund). The study is based on the corpus of texts that includes translations of the Gospels of Matthew and Mark into the Glazov dialect and the Gospel of Matthew into the Sarapul dialect of the Udmurt language, which were published in 1847. The analysis was carried out by comparing the linguistic data from the sources with the one from the Udmurt literary language and its dialects. Whenever possible, questions of the origin of morphological indicators are touched upon in order to determine the innovative or archaic nature of the features identified in the sources under analysis. The analysis reveals various kinds of characteristics in the texts of the first Udmurt Gospels. At the same time, many features are characteristic of the sources both in the Glazov and Sarapul dialects, which probably indicates the compilers’ desire to make all translations as easily understandable as possible for the speakers of different Udmurt dialects. However, the translations into the Glazov dialect still have some distinctive characteristics, such as the functioning of special possessive forms, the presence of secondary spatial cases, the use of egressive forms in the elative function, which indicate their dialect affiliation.

  • Issue Year: 2022
  • Issue No: 04 (47)
  • Page Range: 7-27
  • Page Count: 21
  • Language: Russian