Глагольная морфология первого печатного памятника тверской карельской письменности
Verbal Morphology of the Earliest Printed Piece of Tver Karelian Written Language Heritage

Summary/Abstract: The article provides an overview of the verbal inflection system found in the pamphlet dated 1804 “Translation of some prayers and the shorter catechism in the Korelian language”. The person-number category, tense, mood, and negative forms are described for the conjugated forms and the infinitive and participle formation patterns for the declined forms. A comparison against data on mid-20th century sub-dialects of the Tver Karelian region taken from the Karelian dialectal database Murreh supports the attribution of the source for the translated text as a sample of a Karelian Proper variant of Central Russia. The identified archaisms include: full form of the active 2nd participle, use of the imperfect affix with a short -i (и) / -y (ы), use of the formant of the 3rd person singular of the present indicative -въ, use of 2nd person singular to express 3rd person singular of the present indicative in verbs of a certain inflectional type. The innovations identified during the study (no 1st person plural endings with a single consonant, labialization of the final vowel e of the verb stem in the position before the marker of the III infinitive -мa- / -мѧ-) characterize either the south-western or north-eastern groups of Tolmachy subdialects. The results suggest that the source for the translation was probably a variant transitional between two Tolmachy sub-dialect groups. They also may indicate how the region’s dialectal system has been evolving during the past two centuries.

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