The study analyzes the Ruthenian language of a remarkable bilingual print that appeared in the important Orthodox cultural center Ostrih in Church Slavonic and in Ruthenian “prosta mova” (“common language”) in 1607. It offers a critical evaluation of earlier studies and adds several new observations and theses.
The study analyzes the vocabulary of the Ruthenian “prosta mova” (“common language”) in a bilingual Ruthenian-Church Slavonic printed edition of 1607 (“Likarstvo na ospalyj umysl´´ čolovičyj” – “A Remedy for the Idle Human Mind”, translated by Demian Nalyvajko). We single out and discuss those lexical stems of the Ruthenian text that have no immediate equivalent in the early modern Polish language. Some of these stems belong to the Orthodox church terminology, others can be explained by the Church Slavonic original of the translation, still others demonstrate that Nalyvajko, like many other Ruthenian authors of that period, avoided certain Polish word stems despite the fact that his language is characterized by a plethora of marked Polonisms, and some of these avoided stems do occur in other Ruthenian texts of that period. Several markedly Ruthenian stems belong to the sphere of functional words.