Register im älteren Baltischen: Die Postillen des Altlitauischen und Altlettischen
Register in Old Baltic Languages: Old Lithuanian and Old Latvian Postils

Summary/Abstract: If register is an essential part of language description, as has been stressed in past decades, it cannot be left out of consideration in the historic stages of a language, even though we have no direct grasp of its situational-functional contexts there. Although time-consuming and methodologically challenging, this is a necessary undertaking. The paper takes up the challenge, using the examples of Old Lithuanian and Old Latvian, where the beginning of written transmission roughly coincides with the spread of the Reformation and its counter-movements. Our text material is taken from the seven earliest Baltic postils: the Old Lithuanian Wolfenbüttel Postil, Bretkūnas’s, Daukša’s, and Morkūnas’s postils, the first part of Sirvydas’s Punktai Sakymų, and the third part of Knyga Nobažnystės (the Summa), and Mancelius’s Old Latvian postil. Postils, which nowadays are virtually unknown, were a very early, widespread and long-lived book type, so they were perfectly placed within written transmission to influence both the development and change of register. Combining two text types, differing in communication intent and addressees, namely gospel readings and the homilies that explain them, they can be shown to offer an excellent starting point for investigating historical registers, and for possible methods of exploring them. Based on suitable excerpts from our texts, we investigate a selection of potential register markers from morphosyntax, word order and lexicon: Mancelius’s use of the perfect tense in its different functions is close to orality, while the preterite marks Biblical passages or allusions. An analysis of word order in Old Lithuanian and Old Latvian main clauses shows that gospel readings clearly prefer VO to OV, whereas the choice between SV and VS does not seem to be tied to a difference between text types. Word order among the individual authors indicates clear differences which would have to be investigated within a larger text corpus. Pairings of two (rarely three) (quasi-)synonymous parts of speech (German Doppelungen) can be used as a stylistic device (synonymia) or to avoid commitment to a less-than-established theological concept, but they can also serve a descriptive need. Their predominant occurrence in the homilies signals their explanatory character in view of the addressees of the postils, who were to be given assistance in understanding and disseminating the Gospel text. Also, the greater freedom in combining parts of speech which is observable in all the postils exceeds the limits of a stylistic device and can be most plausibly explained as a case of historical register variation.

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