Novgorod Monuments from the Eleventh to Sixteenth Century and the Final Exam in Russian 101

Novgorod Monuments from Eleventh to Sixteenth Centuries and the Final Exam in 101

December 1, 2009

This won’t be as boring, I hope, as you think it’s going to be.
I’ve noticed in my many years of teaching Slavic, and especially Russian, that student errors in flexional endings show a pattern of learning that in some cases mimicks the early stages of the language, like ontogeny recapituating phylogeny. I marvel over this.

Novogorod monuments — written documents, including private letters, clerical texts copied in monasteries, business documents, deeds, bequests, names carved on amphorae, and more — happen to be the richest and most variegated in Old Russian history, and therefore they reflect the dialectal divergences and probing possibilities of the entire area better than any other. (Note: I refer to Old Russian, not Old Rusian (sic!), which means Old East Slavic, including what would be Ukrainian and what would be Belorussian.)

Take the declension of feminine nouns, like вода, рука, земля, неделя, дверь. By the end of 101 you are supposed to be able to decline these, and, mostly, you can. Everyone knows я читаю книгу, right? (I hope.) Also you know that а/я. у/ю, ы/и are hard/soft varieties of the same thing, so that Gen воды = Gen земли, hard v. soft. In Old Russian these patterns hadn’t gotten so hard-set as they did later, and Old Russian forms were based on older theme vowels and older alternations. So the Gen of the softs was землэ, the last letter standing for the old phoneme jat’ (see my blog on Tsar of All the Russias). Now, jat’ was getting undistinguishable in pronunciation from e. So when things started to change, the people weren’t sure what the Gen of either вода or земля was any more. We read things like у жене, у Ване, just like student mistakes. Now, the old Dat of вода was водэ, and the old Dat of земля was земли. So when this started to get mixed up, you find all kinds of weird Dat and Prep forms: о води, на землэ, and so on, because no one was sure any more what the ‘correct’ old form was, and no one said it that way any more. (Developing vowel reduction muddied the waters even more.) And there weren’t any dictionaries or normative rules. Just like students writing quizzes. Which the heck ending is it? Well, I’ll try...

In some Northwest and Southwest dialects, the odd forms жене, воде became the basis for a united Gen-Dat-Prep singular, as in the oblique cases of 'door' and 'land', where the ending was и. But in these dialects we got из воде, к воде, в воде 'out of the water (Gen), to the water (Dat), in the water (Prep). In still other dialects, we get из воды, к воды, в воды with the old hard Gen generalized for these three cases. And in sill others, we have a kind of Gen I and Gen II developing: мало воды 'little water' (quantifier), из воде 'out of the water' (separational). Phonological changes, as you see, produce both morphological complication and morphological simplification.

Then there is the uncomfortable declension of мать, дочь, дверь, Пермь. You remember the Prep is in –и, в Перми. Also, the Acc is the same as the Nom in these words, which some of you might not remember. And then there is one more case we haven’t had in 101, the instrumental, which has a very very odd ending: дверью, which is -ju, that is, the soft r is followed by jot, then by u. This oddball ending, naturally, gets assimilated to the instrumental of the other feminines (which you haven’t learned yet) and we get all kinds of wild “student” forms; alongside костей, like Instr soft землёй, we get костьей, костьюй (sic), еach with jers after vowels, hence jots.
But the point is the system hadn’t stabilized yet for the average writer. We at least have the advantage of a very lucid and explainable system in Contemporary Russian, we think.

But a language is always changing, and there are all sorts of odds and ends that are finding new uses, or the opposite, getting so archaic they are sticking out like sore thumbs. Examples: the weird plurals братья, сыновья, стулья (Nom) that we supposedly ‘learned’ in 101 but try to ignore. These were actually collectives in Old Russian and meant ‘a group of brothers, a broup of sons, a pile of chairs,’ and so forth, and just about anything could have this suffix and ending, meaning ‘collective’. Now the collective has died and the plurals are weird, but we have to learn them. An exact English parallel are children, brethren, also old collectives.

Another thing that comes up in 101 is один год, два года, три года, четыре года, пять лет. What kind of insane trick is Russian playing on us here? Well, Old Russian lost the number category dual, which earlier was applicable to almost any noun, then, only to nouns that often come in pairs, like banks of a river, arms, legs, and other such. The dual died and lost its meaning, but the endings continued to thrive, e.g. in weird Nom plurals like дома, профессора (don’t worry about them for the 101 final), and also in a new category called paucal: after two, three and four there comes what looks like the Gen sg -a for masculine nouns. But it’s not the Gen sg; it’s the old dual. Laura Janda has written elequently about this in her book Back from the Brink, meaning dead categories littering the battlefield, but ‘endings’ returning from the dead to live again in new flesh.

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