Studija apie slavų kalbų lokatyvą

A STUDY OF THE LOCATIVE IN THE SLAVIC LANGUAGES В. Н. Топоров, Локатив в славянских языках, Издательство Академии наук СССР, Москва, 1961. 380 р. It would not be wrong to say that since the end of the 19th century, when F. Fortunatov began teaching a course in the Lithuanian language at Moscow University in 1886, Moscow has become one of the most important centers for the study of Lithuanian. The scholarly work of G. Ulyanov and V. Porzhezhinsky, well-known students of F. Fortunatov, is associated with Moscow. J. Jablonskis was also a student of F. Fortunatov. For a long time, a good scholar of Lithuanian, Soviet linguist Prof. M. Petersonas, author of the book “Очерк литовского языка” (Moscow, 1955), worked at Moscow University. Yet never before have there been so many linguists in Moscow who know Lithuanian and investigate questions of Lithuanian and Baltic studies as there are today. A particularly large group of such linguists works at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Some volumes of the institute’s publications are devoted almost entirely to problems of the Baltic languages. At the very forefront of researchers into these problems is, undoubtedly, Vladimir Toporov. Over the past few years he has published a dozen or so excellent works on Baltic toponymy, Baltic-Slavic linguistic relations, the historical-comparative grammar of the Baltic languages, and questions of etymology. Some of V. Toporov’s works have also appeared in Lithuanian linguistics publications.1Recently, this linguist published a substantial monograph on the locative in the Slavic languages. The first part of this work is devoted exclusively to questions of Slavic studies, while the second, drawing on a very large body of material, also addresses matters of Baltic studies and Indo-European studies in general, and draws conclusions of interest to researchers into the history of both the Slavic and Baltic languages. The first part surveys in turn the types of locative in Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Polish, Kashubian, Polabian, Lusatian, Czech and Slovak, Old Church Slavonic, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, and Slovenian, focusing chiefly on the locatives used in the ancient monuments of these languages and showing the processes by which particular types of locative disappeared and new types arose. Summarizing the results of the investigation in this part, one may conclude that traces of a locative without a preposition are found in written monuments from a considerable number of Slavic languages. The prepositionless locative is particularly well preserved in Russian texts of the 11th–13th centuries. Yet even in this period the prepositional locative in Russian monuments already expressed all the meanings conveyed by the locative, and by the late 13th and early 14th centuries the prepositional locative had completely displaced the locative without a preposition. In Belarusian and Ukrainian, forms of the locative without a preposition that had developed in these languages have survived 1 See В. Н. Топоров, О балтийских следах в топонимике русских территорий, „Lietuvių kalbotyros klausimai“, vol. 2, Vilnius, 1959, pp. 55—63; В. Н. Топоров, О. Н. Трубачев, Балтийская гидронимия Верхнего Поднепровья, „Lietuvių kalbotyros klausimai“, vol. 4, Vilnius, 1961, pp. 195—217; В. Н. Топоров, Из опыта балто-славянских фольклорных связей, „Lietuvių kalbotyros klausimai“, vol. 6, Vilnius, 1963, pp. 149—175. 318 only in adverbs. It is true that in some Ukrainian Carpathian dialects, chiefly in songs, non-adverbial forms of this locative are also found, but in V. Toporov’s opinion these are probably not relics of the old prepositionless locative. No reliable examples of the prepositionless locative have been found in monuments of Old Polish. No traces of this locative are found in Kashubian or Polabian. A considerable number of examples of the prepositionless locative occur in monuments of the Lusatian languages. These locatives, however, are probably a product of later times and are not genetically related to the old Slavic prepositionless locative. Data from ancient Czech monuments are highly valuable for the study of the history of the Slavic locative. Old Czech texts contain archaic features of the locative that have not been preserved at all in other Slavic languages. The prepositionless locative is abundantly attested in Czech monuments. Many examples of this locative with various meanings also occur in Old Church Slavonic. In the South Slavic languages, one can say that reliable examples of the prepositionless locative are entirely absent. As noted, the second part of the work is of greatest importance for Lithuanian studies. In this part, the author addresses a question that would have seemed entirely absurd even at the beginning of the 20th century. It seeks to explain when the locative case arose, as attested in the monuments of many Indo-European languages, especially the eastern ones. It was formerly claimed that the locative had developed in Proto-Indo-European. On the basis of Avestan, Baltic, and Slavic data, and partly Armenian data, and especially under the spell of Sanskrit evidence, an eight-case system was attributed to Proto-Indo-European, with the locative included as an independent case. But when the very oldest Indo-European texts—the Hittite cuneiform tablets from the second millennium BCE—were deciphered, it became clear that in them the case form corresponding to the locative in the eastern Indo-European languages expressed both dative and locative relations alike. The author of the work argues that it is difficult to imagine that separate dative and locative cases, once existing with different endings, could have merged into one. Rather, one should suppose that dative and locative were not distinguished originally (cf. p. 277). Evidence from certain other Indo-European languages (e.g., Germanic and Italic) likewise does not show that the dative and locative were clearly distinguished in the earliest period. Clear differentiation of these forms in some Indo-European languages began in comparatively later times. Having surveyed the locative in individual Indo-European languages, V. Toporov draws the following conclusions: 1) forms regarded as locatives in various Indo-European languages are often formations of different types, related to one another only by similarity of meaning; 2) in all Indo-European languages, clear traces are found of a locative that had not yet fully formed (these traces are especially characteristic in words with consonant stems and sometimes i, u stems; such cases are very rare in the productive ā, o stems); 3) the hypothesis that the locative developed from adverbs is supported by a greater number of facts than the opposite hypothesis (when applied to the western Indo-European languages); 4) the locative can hardly be regarded as a common Indo-European case; 5) many circumstances point to the original identity of the locative and dative (cf. p. 285). 319 The second part of the monograph also devotes considerable attention to the locative in the Baltic languages. Material from the Baltic languages is used both to address general questions concerning the history of the Indo-European locative and as a means of illuminating particular processes in the development of the locative in the Slavic languages. V. Toporov emphasizes that Baltic data are especially significant not only because of their proximity to Slavic-language facts, but also because of their archaic character. The author gathered a large part of the material from written monuments and dialect texts. The book presents data from the Baltic languages ranging from the Prussian catechisms, Mažvydas’s writings, and Adolfi’s grammar to collections of Latvian and Lithuanian folklore and the works of J. Endzelīns and J. Jablonskis. The extensive literature on Baltic studies cited in the work could perhaps be supplemented by one or another study of Lithuanian or Latvian dialectology published in recent years. However, the findings of these studies would not contradict the work’s general conclusions. In conclusion, we shall point out only a few minor inaccuracies, which in no way diminish the overall value of the work. On p. 295, Mažvydas’s sentence “as the angels come, they sing...” is not translated quite correctly. On p. 322, the Latvian examples with the preposition ap. are translated incorrectly. It cannot be claimed that the examples given on p. 319, in which location is expressed by the accusative with the preposition apie, are foreign to literary Lithuanian. V. Toporov correctly notes that the Prussian language has no locative at all, explaining in a footnote: “If we do not count a single pronominal example from the Enchiridion: bhe stallėti pērdin en schisman ackewijstin Krixtianiskan astin, p. 77, 15, which nevertheless proves nothing, since it has no counterparts (formally) in other languages” (cf. p. 283). For our part, we would add that J. Endzelīns was also inclined to correct the form schisman to the dative *schismau < *šismū2. Moreover, J. Endzelīns regarded not only the adverb bitai, mentioned by V. Toporov, but also the first element of the compounds sallubai busennis, salaubalgannan, sallūbaiwirins as a doubtful o-stem singular locative3. Vilnius A. Sabaliauskas ON M. RUDNICKI’S ETYMOLOGICAL INTERPRETATIONS OF GALINDA, PRIEGLIUS, AND SŪDUVA Mikołaj Rudnicki, Prałowiańszczyzna Lechia-Polska, II, Wspólnota słowiańska. Wspólnota lechicka-polska, Poznań, 1961. In this work by a Polish linguist, questions concerning the ethnogenesis, prehistoric territories, and migrations of the Slavic tribes, including the Polish people, are examined extensively on the basis of linguistic and archaeological data. It also discusses Slavic prehistory, dialectology, material culture, and 2 Plg. J. Endzelīns, Senprūšu valoda, Rīgā, 1943, p. 80—81. 3 Cf. ibid., pp. 58–59. 320