Interlingual lexical variants in the gospel text (based on the Dubno Gospel)

For history researchers of the Ukrainian language, the Dubno Gospel holds a special place among the texts of the Old Ukrainian period. Although it was transcribed in church slavonic and reflects the second south slavic influence, it also contains numerous features of the Ukrainian vernacular, particularly phonetic and morphological. The manuscript under study is interesting and important, especially for examining the lexical composition. The purpose of this article is to identify and analyze individual lexical variants, their structure, and semantic characteristics in the Dubno Gospel, as well as to highlight some features of borrowings in this manuscript and other canonical texts. It has been established that lexical variants (particularly nouns) with different roots, which denote the same concept or are semantically related in gospel contexts, are characteristic of the Dubno Gospel, as well as other canonical texts. Lexical variability in the Dubno Gospel is observed not only in the textual discrepancies among the Tetraevangelion, but also within the gospel text of a single evangelist. Among the lexical variants, two-component pairs predominate, comprising (mostly borrowed and native) lexemes, specifically: hellenism/slavicism, slavicism/slavicism, hellenism/romanism, and germanism/slavicism. The largest group of translated and duplicated words with slavic equivalents consists of hellenisms. It has been determined that slavic lexemes mostly emerged as semantic calques of greek words. Additionally, the translation of borrowed words into native lexemes in the text is unevenly represented. Similar texts from other evangelists may contain different slavic equivalents for hellenisms or other borrowings. The text also contains numerous instances of native words being duplicated by other native words. No evidence of vernacular vocabulary infiltration is observed in the studied text. A comparison of identical passages in various canonical texts allows us to conclude that, at the lexical level, the Dubno Gospel shares many similarities with the Ostroh Bible.