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The origin of the ‘l-less perfect’ in the Novgorod birchbark documents

Происхождение ‘безэлевого перфекта’ в новгородских берестяных грамотах

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Abstract

The paper summarizes the previous research on and proposes a wholly new explanation for the so-called ‘l-less perfect’, known from the Novgorod birchbark corpus (vzja esm’ ‘I took’, ni posla esi ‘you didn’t send’ etc.). The existing theories are all problematic. The forms in question cannot be connected with the aorist. Moreover, it is necessary to explain why the l-less perfect is only found in the masculine singular and why it arose exclusively in this particular dialect. In the analysis proposed here, the l-less perfect is explained as the product of a morphological analogy, for which concrete motivation can be indicated.

Аннотация

В статье резюмируются результаты прежних исследований и предлагается совершенно новое объяснение так называемого ‘безэлевого перфекта’, известного из корпуса новгородских берестяных грамот (взя есмь ‘я взял’, ни посла еси ‘ты не послал’ и др.). Все имеющиеся теории этого феномена сомнительны. Данные формы нельзя связывать с аористом. Более того, нуждается в объяснении тот факт, что безэлевый перфект развился исключительно в данном диалекте и употреблялся только в формах ед. числа м. рода. В предлагаемом анализе безэлевый перфект рассматривается как продукт морфологической аналогии, конкретная причина которой может быть определена.

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Notes

  1. Abbreviations: accentual paradigm—ap; CSR—Contemporary Standard Russian; Kash.—Kashubian; MBulg.—Middle Bulgarian; OCS—Old Church Slavic; OE—Old English; OHG—Old High German; ONR—Old North Russian; OR—Old Russian; OSerb.—Old Serbian; PIE—Proto-Indo-European; PSl.—Proto-Slavic; Sl.—Slavic; Slnc.—Slovincian; Ukr.—Ukrainian; Ved.—Vedic Sanskrit.

  2. These issues have of course spawned considerable discussion. Apart from the usual sources such as DND2, Zaliznjak (1986, 1993) or Le Feuvre (1998a, 1998b), on the ending -e cf. Vermeer (1991, 1994), Krys’ko (1993), Honselaar (1997), Olander (2012) with lit.; on the palatalizations cf. Vermeer (2000) with lit.

  3. Together with its spinoffs that are also based on the l-participle.

  4. “črezvyčajnaja redkost’ ” (DND2, p. 142). All translations (incl. glosses) mine.

  5. Not taking into account the conditional auxiliary.

  6. “u kotorogo usečen suffiks -l- (vmeste s okončaniem)”.

  7. “po krajnej mere, dlja tex glagolov, kotorye real’no vstretilis’ v dannoj forme”.

  8. “kak budto by ne otličajutsja po značeniju ot obyčnogo perfekta, t.e. bezėlevyj perfekt, vidimo, možet rassmatrivat’sja kak ego morfologičeskij variant”.

  9. In this section I leave out the form , which has quite convincingly been shown by Vermeer to represent an innovated form of the past active gerund (reported in DND2, pp. 144–145). See, however, Sect. 5.6.

  10. Cf. the references in footnote 31.

  11. “[ė]to važnyj primer parallel’nogo upotreblenija odnim i tem že avtorom obyčnoj i bezėlevoj formy perfekta ot odnogo i togo že glagola”.

  12. “gramota napisana v sintaksičeskom otnošenii neumelo” (DND2, p. 578).

  13. “ ‘Iskormili’—otdali predstaviteljam administracii na prokorm ix lošadej (t.e. v kačestve podati, nazyvaemoj kormnoje ili )”.

  14. “nejasnye primery”.

  15. “prostoj propusk bukvy na pis’me”.

  16. “nejasnye primery”.

  17. “V otličie ot aorista, bezėlevyĭ perfekt predstavlen v gramotax, ne imejuščix oficial’nogo xaraktera”.

  18. From DND2 and Zaliznjak et al. (2005).

  19. See Reinhart (1992, p. 370ff.) with lit. The accent marks are those standardly used, see Lehfeldt (2001).

  20. Cf. e.g. Vaillant (1950, p. 255).

  21. At our stage we can hardly operate with anything else but the position of stress, or being part of a given ap.

  22. As is well known, the accentuation of i-verbs belonging to ap b. is an extremely complex issue.

  23. “v drugix drevnerusskix pamjatnikax, v tom čisle nesuščix vlijanie drevnenovgorodskogo dialekta, on ne otmečen”.

  24. “ranee neizvestna”.

  25. Of course, here we mean the specific kind of l-less perfect as seen in the birchbark corpus, not any given instance of a form going back to the PSl. l-participle that happens to have lost its l in one way or another. Other than the many obvious instantiations of what could be termed an l-less perfect—such as the type of CSR mog ‘could’ (of course unrelated to our topic, since it is the phonological outcome of PSl. ∗ )—one may mention the phenomenon observed in Kashubian (historically also in Slovincian), where it is the sg.fem.perf that displays an l-less form, but only in verbs with vocalic stems, i.e. where the original -l- was intervocalic. Cf. Slnc. sã ‘sowed’ < ∗ sěla (Lorentz 1903, p. 322), modern Kash. pisa ‘wrote’ < ∗ pisala (Breza and Treder 1981, p. 133). The phenomenon is optional in modern literary language, i.e. the contracted and non-contracted forms are morphological variants. There are also dialects where -l- is replaced by -n- in these forms. These facts have never been explained in a satisfactory way. It is hardly conceivable that the ONR and Kashubian / Slovincian phenomena could be related, but even the surface similarity is intriguing. The only scholar who alludes to it is Sičinava (2005, p. 209, fn. 39).

  26. “aorist so svjazkoj”.

  27. “kontaminacija aorista i perfekta”.

  28. “prežde čem polnost’ju izčeznut’, aorist prošel stadiju, pri kotoroj forma 3 ed. aorista vosprinimalas’ kak ėkvivalent perfektnogo pričastija (muž. ed.)”.

  29. “mexanizm dobavlenija svjazki k glagol’noj forme, pervonačal’no ee ne trebovavšej, zdes’ v suščnosti takoj že, kak v konstrukcii tipa (vmesto ), kotoraja xorošo izvestna kak iz pergamennyx, tak i iz berestjanyx gramot”. I am not certain if this additional explanation is to be treated as an indispensable component of this theory: if one accepts the conjecture that the old 3sg.aor became a morphological variant of the sg.masc.perf, it would have been natural for it to require the auxiliary in exactly the same way as the ‘real’ perfects did.

  30. Kwon’s statement (2009, p. 171) that Nørgård-Sørensen simply follows Zaliznjak’s view (1986) is slightly inaccurate; as should be clear from my summaries, their opinions might be more or less compatible, but they are not identical. In the simplest interpretation, Zaliznjak (1986) talks about how the 3sg.aor could have passed through a stage of being a morphological variant of the sg.masc l-perfect before disappearing completely from the spoken language—there is no outright assumption of speakers imitating learned forms. Thus, Zaliznjak’s and Nørgård-Sørensen’s theories can be seen as two separate explanations—both clever, but in my view difficult to reconcile with the data, and inferior to Zaliznjak’s analysis (DND1 onwards) of a real l-less version of the perfect.

  31. For recent discussion and practical application of this knowledge, cf. Schaeken (2011) and the previous studies referred to therein. The approach adopted by Schaeken is no doubt correct, but in our case, given the scarcity of the evidence, the material apparently cannot be interpreted in such detail (that is, I can see no evidence for any of the forms being used or avoided according to any consistent pattern in any of the relevant texts). For the earlier discussion of registers and variation in the birchbark letters, cf. in particular Zaliznjak (1987) and Vermeer (1997a).

  32. On the phenomenon of ‘morfologija dialektnaja s (neposledovatel’noj) korrekciej’ (‘dialectal morphology with (inconsistent) adjustment’), cf. the sources mentioned in the previous footnote.

  33. Only in her unpublished dissertation; the discussion is omitted from 1998b.

  34. It can in all likelihood be assumed that she would have considered (SR39), found a few years later, on par with these.

  35. Cf. Dalewska-Greń (1997, pp. 367–369) for a brief overview of some typical developments that have affected the l-participles in the individual Sl. languages.

  36. “neobxodimo ukazat’ na ob”ektivno krajne neudačnuju kvalifikaciju A.A. Zaliznjakom formy […] kak «bezėlevogo perfekta»”.

  37. “Simptomatično, čto […] net ni odnogo primera s povestvovatel’nym monologičeskim tret’im licom. Ėto označaet, čto svjazka vstavljaetsja imenno dlja oboznačenija markirovannogo dialogovogo lica, a veščestvennaja čast’ vyražaetsja glavnym prošedšim vremenem—aoristom”.

  38. “v pozdnix perevodax s nemeckogo”.

  39. Note how, for example, the alternation of the type Ukr. dáv ∼ dalá ‘gave’, although it was removed from other alternating environments such as in the declension of masc. nouns stíl ∼ stolá ‘table’, did persist in uniform environments such as vóvk ∼ vóvka ‘wolf’, see Flier (1983).

  40. I limit myself to the singular here.

  41. Zaliznjak says this openly in 1986 (p. 146), but not elsewhere.

  42. See the references in footnote 31 above.

  43. “Izredka v ramkax odnoj gramoty predstavleny oba konkurirujuščix okončanija, naprimer, <> v № 439 (rubež XII i XIII vv.), inogda daže u odnogo i togo že slova, sr. i v № 589 (ser. XIV v.)”.

  44. There are, it goes without saying, substantial differences.

  45. As we have seen, the only researcher to pay attention to this point and use it in his theory was Kwon (2009).

  46. In the comparison of the structure of the participles, I omit neuter forms (such as χot’a), since for pragmatic reasons their agreement capabilities can hardly be compared with those of the masc. and fem.

  47. Of course, constructions of this type are also attested in other older Sl. languages. See Haralampiev (2001, p. 167) for discussion on the situation in OCS and MBulg.

  48. We will not be dealing with the prehistory of this ending here, although it is in my opinion one of the single most fascinating puzzles in Sl. historical linguistics (see DND2, pp. 147–149 and the references cited in footnote 2 of the present article). The l-less perfect is a late innovation, and whatever caused the discrepancy between -e in ONR and elsewhere in Sl. many centuries earlier cannot be of relevance.

  49. I ignore changes such as the merger of /č/ and /c/ etc.

  50. This is related to the first of Kuryłowicz’s ‘laws of analogy’ (1947, p. 20).

  51. See e.g. Sihler (1995, p. 290).

  52. See Kluge-Seebold (2011, p. 966).

  53. “[r]azrešit’ ėtu problemu dolžny novye naxodki berestjanyx gramot”.

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  1. Department of Linguistics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Marek Majer

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I would like to thank Michael S. Flier for his very helpful corrections and suggestions. I would also like to thank the participants of the 32nd East Coast Indo-European Conference (ECIEC) for their valuable feedback. Of course, the responsibility for all opinions and errors lies solely with me.

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Majer, M. The origin of the ‘l-less perfect’ in the Novgorod birchbark documents. Russ Linguist 38, 167–185 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11185-014-9130-5

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