Veel „Agenda Parva” keelest
More on the Language of Agenda Parva

Summary/Abstract: The Catholic church manual Agenda Parva (1622) is a South Estonian linguistic monument. Its language has been studied since 1938, but some specifications are still in order. In the phrase omme wiide mielde-ga ‘with one’s own five senses’ (modern spelling omme viide meeldega) omme should not be interpreted as an erroneously spelt genitive singular but rather as the genitive plural of the pronoun oma ‘one’s own’, spelt according to the general principle followed throughout the publication, notably that a long consonant is rendered by doubling the letter. As for wiide (the middle word of the phrase) it has hitherto been interpreted as a very archaic genitive singular. However, the agreement of the first and last members suggests the possibility of similar agreement applying to the middle member. Indeed, the form wiide looks exactly like the regular consonant-stem de-marked genitive vīᴅè << *vīt̆ten of the biradical word viis ‘five’, conforming to the sound change t̆t > ᴅ after the 2nd-quantity vowel or diphthong of the first syllable, characteristic of Tartu dialect. Hence we can conclude that the translators/compilers of Agenda Parva made up a word form that was phonetically correct, but typically for native speakers of Indo-European languages they violated a rule applying in South Estonian as well as in most Finno-Ugric languages, which requires that the noun modified by a numeral should be used in the singular, and this means that there should have been oma viie meelega, not omme wiide mielde-ga.

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