НОВЫЕ НАХОДКИ ПАМЯТНИКОВ ДРЕВНЕПЕРМСКОГО ЯЗЫКА И ПИСЬМА
THE NEWLY DISCOVERED MONUMENTS OF THE OLD PERMIAN LANGUAGE AND SCRIPT

Summary/Abstract: The paper for the first time publishes monuments of the Old Permian language written with Abur, or the script of St. Stephen of Perm; these sources are previously unknown or have not been introduced into academic circulation. They are published here as facsimiles, with transliteration, transcription, and Russian translation. Perhaps the oldest of these inscriptions (from the 1460s - the early 1470s?) is the postscript written in a mixture of Old Permian and Russian at the end of the Church Slavonic Homilae by St. Gregory the Great: it was copied in the Ferapontov Monastery, in the White Lake area, perhaps by the hand of St. Martinianus of White Lake (Belozersky). The next earliest of the Old Permian documents — and the earliest to be dated precisely - is scribal marginalia on a manuscript book with the spiritual homilies of St. Isaac the Syrian in a Church Slavonic translation; it was copied in Ust-Vym (the Komi area) in 1486 by Gabriel (Gavrila) the Deacon (Kįldaš). Other Old Permian postscripts were made at the court of the archbishop of Novgorod the Great in the early 1490s in two volumes with the new Church Slavonic translations from the Vulgate; they were prepared in the circle of Archbishop Gennady of Novgorod and Pskov. Finally, the last word of the late 15th - early 16th century inscription in the Church Slavonic Corpus Areopagiticum has been re-attributed as Old Permian rather than Slavic cryptography in Abur; this book was donated to the Annunciation Church of Ust-Vym by St. Pitirim, bishop of Perm. The total number of new texts is 37 word-forms, including lexemes that were not previously recorded for this period - this is significant for the Old Permian corpus of the 15th - early 16th centuries. Although from the graphic, phonetic, grammatical, and lexical points of view, these texts basically represent the same linguistic system found in previously known Old Permian monuments, they demonstrate, on the one hand, the inclusion of Old Permian scribes into the activities of professional Old Russian scriptoria and, on the other, they testify to the emergence of interest on the part of East Slavic bookmen in “indigenous” languages. Knowing these languages could be a sign of belonging to a special intellectual stratum that included both the creators of the first Church Slavonic complete biblical collection (the Gennady Bible) and members of the so-called heresy of the Judaizers.

• Details
• Contents