Author’s name:
Andrey V. Ivanov – Linguistics University of Nizhny Novgorod, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia
Abstract:
The article examines the linguistic concept and technical term strast’ (“passion”; plural strasti), which refers to a set of prosodic diacritics used in Church Slavonic, in the pre-Petrine period of the Russian language from semantic and lexical-terminological perspectives. The study aims to trace the development of the conceptual content of the term strast’, to determine which linguistic phenomena were classified as strasti, and to establish the rationale for including such phenomena as the apostrophe, hyphen, and hypodiastole, and later erik, payerok, slitnaya, and myagkaya, within this category. The object of the study is the semantic structure of the technical term strast’, first attested in the fifteenth-century treatise On Letters by Konstantin of Kostenets and subsequently in manuscript copies of that treatise and grammatical manuscripts based upon it. Unlike Konstantin, who regarded the apostrophe, hyphen, and hypodiastole as strasti, Maksim Grek considered the hypodiastole, in its function as a sign marking interrogative intonation in writing, to be the only strast’ characteristic of Russian, whereas the apostrophe and hyphen belonged exclusively to Greek prosody. These prosodic signs retained their status as “prosodic strasti” until the beginning of the eighteenth century. During the first half of the seventeenth century, the signs erik and payerok also came to be classified as strasti because they were associated with the reduction or loss of vocalic sound, having been used in writing as substitutes for the “mute” letters ъ (er) and ь (er’). Gradually, these letters themselves also came to be functionally equated with strasti. During the same period, slitnaya and myagkaya were likewise incorporated into this category because they represented in writing additional types of phonological modification “suffered” by the sound structure of a word or utterance. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, with the introduction of the Civil Script, erik and payerok likewise lost their status as strasti. As the study demonstrates, the term strasti may be interpreted in two senses: (1) as the set of supralinear and inline signs used in pre-reform writing, and (2) as the set of processes of “reduction” and “augmentation,” understood as different types of phonological modification affecting words or utterances. The strasti of “reduction” correspond broadly to apheresis, syncope, and apocope — that is, the omission of letters or syllables at the beginning, middle, or end of a word or utterance — whereas the strasti of “augmentation” correspond to prosthesis, epenthesis, dieresis, and phonemic or syllabic lengthening
| Section | LANGUAGE AND CULTURE |
| DOI: | 10.47388/2072-3490/lunn2026-74-2-34-46 |
| Downloads | 12 |
| Key words | prosodic passions; apostrophe; hyphen; erik; payerk; impoverishment; abundance; historical-linguistic analysis; semantic analysis |