I. P. Novak, “Nominal morphology of the earliest printed piece of Tver Karelian written language heritage”, Proceedings of ISP RAS, 2025, Volume 37, Issue 4(1),Pages <nobr>199

Nominal morphology of the earliest printed piece of Tver Karelian written language heritage

I. P. Novak^ab

^a Institute of Linguistics, Literature and History of KarRC RAS
^b Ivannikov Institute for System Programming of the RAS

Abstract: The article describes the nominal inflexion systems of the language used in the pamphlet dated 1804 “Translation of some prayers and the shorter catechism in the Korelian language” – the first printed piece of the Tver Karelian written language heritage. This study was necessitated by the lack of a previous systematic linguistic analysis of this source, which contains a unique corpus of data on the Karelian historical grammar and dialectology. The Karelian text is made of around 2,500 lexemes, more than a half of them represented by nominal parts of speech. The analysis made in this article covers all grammatical categories of nominals: number, case, possessiveness. The study was conducted using the tools of the LingvoDoc linguistic platform. The material found in this source was compared against the new-script variant of the Tver Karelian language and with data on mid-20th century Tver Karelian dialectal variants from the Murreh dialectal database.
The nominal inflexion system in the translated text has no substantial differences from the Tolmachyovo sub-dialect group of the southern dialect of Karelian Proper, supporting the dialectal attribution of the source made previously. One of the findings of this study is that the language of this source preserves some archaic traits that had been lost from modern Tver Karelian sub-dialects. Such archaisms include the use of the plurality indicator -й- with polysyllabic single-stem nominals ending in a diphthong, endings -енъ in the genitive plural, -ѧ in the partitive plural, -же in the illative, -ла / -лѧ in the adessive-allative, -са / -сѧ in the inessive, -тѧ in the abessive, possessive suffixes, and the use of postpositional constructs to render the commitative and approximative meanings. A novel feature is the expansion of the plurality formant -лой- / -лїой- to single-stem nominals with an -e vowel stem and a trend to abandon possessive suffixes for a wider use of genitive constructs.

Keywords: Karelian, Tver Karelians, written language heritage, dialectology, history of language, morphology, nominal inflexion, linguistic platform LingvoDoc.

DOI: 10.15514/ISPRAS-2025-37(4)-12