Translation of the “Gospel of Luke” (1821) into Erzya: some features of noun morphology

Abstract

Introduction. This paper considers some features of noun morphology in the translation of the “Gospel of Luke” (1821) into the Erzya language, namely the indicators of such grammatical categories of the noun as number, case and the categories of possessiveness and definiteness. Analysis of old manuscripts is necessary, as it provides important information in the reconstruction of the language. Materials and Methods. The text of the translation of the “Gospel of Luke” (1821) into Erzya, materials of the Erzya dialects were collected by the author during the expeditions to Samara region in 2011–2012. The analysis of the books on the topic of dialect features of the Erzya dialects were also used for the research. When working with the material, the morphological paradigms in the published part of the concordance of the “Gospel of Luke” (lingvodoc.ispras.ru) and the material obtained by the method of continuous sampling were compared with the data of modern dialects of the Erzya language. Results and Discussion. It is shown that the indicators of the category of number of nouns in the text of the manuscript correspond to the affixes of the Central dialect and are used according to the same rules. The case system is different from the case system of the literary language, namely the semantics of some cases is represented by other case formants, postpositions, and other syntactic constructions. The index declension is represented by the formant -s’t’, and the possessive declension shows the numerical difference between the possessors in 1 and 3 persons singular. Conclusion. The analysis of the language material allows to conclude that the translated text belongs to the Central dialect, which has its own distinctive features. At the same time, the final solution of the dialectal affiliation of the manuscript should be based on a comprehensive account not only of the material considered in the paper, but also, at least, on the results of further detailed analysis of the features of phonetics, morphology and vocabulary.