České modlitby a písně psané cyrilicí ze severního Kavkazu a Sibiře
Czech Prayers and Songs from the Northern Caucasus and Siberia Recorded in Cyrillic

Summary/Abstract: The paper is based on the author’s field research and focuses on Czech prayers and songs written down in the Cyrillic alphabet by speakers of two Czech immigrant dialects: the Northern Caucasus, on the one hand, and Western Siberia, on the other. The two groups of texts are analyzed primarily with regard to the following questions: 1) to what extent did Cyrillic work for recording Czech sounds? 2) What features of the immigrant dialects under examination are reflected in those texts? The author shows that 1) the use of the Cyrillic alphabet by the dialects’ speakers was not unsystematic; moreover, in some cases we find unique decisions, e.g. the usage of the Russian letter ‘ё’ for Czech ‘ě’; and 2) the Cyrillic versions of these mainly traditional texts sometimes exhibit rare dialectal features that are no longer attested in the current speech of descendants of the Czech peasants who migrated to the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th century.

• Details
• Contents