1724 m. rugpjūčio 9 d. įsakas dėl tvorų ir jo vertėjas Christophoras Heinrichas Wegneris
The Edict on Fences of 9 August, 1724 and its Translator Christophor Heinrich Wegner

Summary/Abstract: During the preparation of the publications of the edicts of the Prussian authorities for the website of the Database of Old Lithuanian Writings of the Lithuanian Language Institute, the only currently known copy of the Prussian government’s edict forbidding the burning of fences in winter, issued by the Prussian authorities on 9 August, 1724, was discovered in the Library of the University of Leipzig (UBL: 01E-2015-25). Two copies of the German edict from which it was translated were found in the Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences (LMAVB: E-343). Up until now, the 1878 transcript of the Lithuanian edict, prepared and published by Hugo Weber on the basis of a copy owned by August Leskien and lost during World War II, has been used. The supplement to the article presents transcripts and photographs of the edicts and a word index. Documents from the Secret State Archives Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin show that Christophor Heinrich Wegner (1685–1731), a priest of the Lithuanian church in Königsberg, worked as a translator of the edicts into Lithuanian between 1721 and 1731. A comparison of the language and orthography of the published edict with other edicts of the early eighteenth century revealed features common to all texts of Lithuania Minor and specific only to the period of Wegner’s translation work. The linguistic elements of this edict that are typical of the edicts printed during Wegner’s translation period are the adverb ik čiolei ‘until now’. The preposition with [č] occurs only in the edicts attributed to Wegner. The conjunction ydant ‘so that’ written with is found in other texts, albeit rarely, and the genitive forms menesės ‘of the month’, rugpjutės ‘of August’ are also the most abundant in Wegner’s translation period. According to the currently available data, the chronological distribution of the Germanised Slavism štonas ‘state, condition’ is limited to the years 1721–1723. The orthography of the edict does not stand out among other writings: some words are accented; morphological forms are also marked with diacritical marks (in line with the rules laid down in Danielius Kleinas’s grammars and with the modifications of those rules that were common in the period under study). The nasal letters are consistently marked, there is a correct distinction between [ė] and [e], and the length of the vowel [ī] is properly marked. Nouns are capitalized inconsistently, and the quantity of consonant geminates is also similar to other texts. The edict is written in the western variant of the written language that had evolved on the basis of the southern subdialects of the West Aukštaičiai in Prussia. There are no distinct dialectal features; [ė] is not confused with [ie], and [o] with [uo] (with only rare exceptions). The future tense form sudegys ‘will burn’ shows regular extinction of nasal vowels, and such forms are also common in other texts of the period under study. The deformations of the participial system iškirtomos tampa ‘are cut off’ and uždraudama tampa ‘is forbidden’ could be seen as artificial creation of forms in accordance with the morphological principle of orthography; similar cases occur also in the work of other translators.

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