'Christian Faith' by Prince Vladimir the Great: Fluctuations of abstract lexemes

E.M. Vereshchagin

V.V. Vinogradov Russian Language Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, 119019 Russia

E-mail: zhenya2956@yandex.ru

Received May 23, 2017

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Abstract

According to Russian chronicles, Prince Vladimir the Great, being baptized in Chersones in 986, pronounced in Slavonic two confessions of faith – the well-known Credo Niceo-Constantinopolitanum and the second confession, which has been unknown until the recent time and highly enigmatic. It is obvious that the second “faith” was translated from Greek, but the Byzantine text was found only in the middle of the 19th century. Prince Vladimir professed the sc. li,belloj (Lat. deminutivum libellus – knizhitsa (книжица 'little book')) written (about 835) by Michael the Synkellos, the prominent 'great confessor', (o` me,gaj o`mologhth,j). The Slavonic translation is very interesting as a linguistic source and, nevertheless, rather neglected by specialists. The Slavonic versions of Michael's “Libellus” represent five separate translations undertaken in different historical periods (in the span of six centuries) and at different territories – both South- and East-Slavic. Common for all five versions is the great variability of abstract lexemes. The linguistic nature of intensive variability cannot be reduced to the known mechanisms. So, the author of the investigation has introduced a new terminus technicus (fluctuation) to designate the observed phenomenon of theological termination (=creation and competition of termini as a part of language-building activity). A long comparative list of lexical variants (being items in the process of mentioned fluctuation) has been added to the theoretical argumentation.

Keywords: libellus, homologetic document, lexical variation, collation of variants, fluctuation, doctrinal interpretation

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For citation: Vereshchagin E.M. “Christian Faith” by Prince Vladimir the Great: Fluctuations of abstract lexemes. Uchenye Zapiski Kazanskogo Universiteta. Seriya Gumanitarnye Nauki, 2017, vol. 159, no. 5, pp. 1097–1105. (In Russian)

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