The Root Aorist in Old East Slavonic Parimejnik Copies (To the Online Corpus Edition)

Abstract

The article focuses on aorist forms and root aorist distribution in the Old East Slavonic Parimejnik corpus, an Old Testament lectionary, being one of the most important liturgical texts in Byzantine and Slavonic rites, it provided the Old Testament knowledge. The root aorist is a diagnostic type of archaic forms that indicates the reference of the text with Cyril-and-Methodius tradition to the emergence of Slavonic written culture. The analysis is carried out for the first time and is based on the corpus approach. It became possible due to the online edition of five Old East Slavonic copies of Parimejnik: Lazarevskiy from ca. 1150–1170, Zakharinskiy from 1271, Kozminskiy from 1312–1313, Troitskiy I from the 14 th century, and Fedorovskiy II, from the 13 th century. The author discovered 18 entries of root aorists in Zakhariinskiy Parimejnik. This is the largest number of entries in the late Old East Slavonic written sources altogether. 10 entries were found at Lazarevskiy Parimejnik. The root aorist is represented in the rest of the copies in sporadic forms. The distribution of forms in the copies corresponds precisely to the four distinguished editorial types: the most ancient, Zakharinskiy, Kozminskiy, and Semenovskiy. The samples of editing root aorist forms were revealed to occur due to their confusion with homonymous forms of "zero" presence and participles.