Archivum Lithuanicum

The norms of emerging standard Lithuanian language began to reach inhabitants of countryside and towns at the end of the nineteenth century. Lithuanian epitaphs reveal how the norms of standard Lithuanian spread from the end of the nineteenth into the twentieth century. Even though many epitaph texts did not survive, and even though they are short and anonymous, they reveal the time when people started to recognize the prestige of emerging standard and focus their language on it. It could be assumed that the influence of standard language might have been stronger in areas where clandestine Lithuanian publications were distributed more intensively. According to Vytautas Merkys, they mainly were dispersed throughout the counties adjacent to the state border: Telšiai, Raseiniai, Naumiestis, and Vilkaviškis. This paper analyses the epitaphs from these regions—the Western part of Lowlanders (up to areas around Mažeikiai, Viekšniai, Nerimdaičiai, Varniai, Tytuvėnai, and Raseiniai) and the South West Highlanders (up to areas around Vilkija, Pilviškiai, and Vinkšnupiai). The articles published in periodicals in the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century show that intellectuals considered epitaphs as public language reflecting situation of Lithuanian language. They were not satisfied with epitaphs, written in non-Lithuanian or written inconsistently. In Lithuanian epitaphs the abbreviation S. P., indicative of Polish Swiętej Pamięci ‘sacred memory’ or Lithuanian expression with a loanword Šventos Pom[i]eties / Pomėties ‘sacred memory’ was used. It was used throughout all the period, found even in 1911. However, in the end of the ninth and the beginning of the tenth decade of the nineteenth century we find the collocation Šventos atminties ‘sacred memory’ and its abbreviations S. A., sz. atm., Š. A. The collocation Amžinąjį atilsį ‘eternal rest’ and its abbreviations A. A. ir Am. at. started to be used simultaneously. Thus, part of community began to feel the need to avoid the loanwords. The analysis of the orthography of epitaphs shows that the letters <L, l> (instead of traditional <Ł, ł>), marking hard consonant, also <AI , ai> [ai], <EI , ei> [ei (instead of traditional <AJ, aj>, <EJ, ej>) moved easily to personal usage from emerging standard. Letter <V, v> (instead of <W, w>) was used less frequently in the beginning of investigated period. There were cases, when letter <V, v> was used in the epitaph, but names, prayer “Hail Mary” has been written with the then traditional letter <W, w>. It suggests that some users did not want to change the orthography of special words—names and titles of prayers— and the letter <V, v> still was not perceived as own. Diacritical characters <Č, č>, <Š, š> (instead of traditional <CZ, cz>, <SZ , sz>) appeared in epitaphs even later of <V, v>. The change of orthography of epitaphs shows that focus on emerging standard strengthened in turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and particularly intensified during

The opening line in the preface of the first Lithuanian book prepared by Martynas Mažvydas (1547) reads imkiet mani ir ſkaitikiet (lit.) ‘take me and read’ and I suggest that this phrase may reflect the famous divine words heard by Saint Augustine: tolle lege, tolle lege ‘take up—read, take up—read’ (Confessiones VIII , 12, 29). Both phrases match with respect to the verbs, their order, and the mood, but the Lithuanian phrase is not repeated. It has two additional words (mani ‘me’, and ir ‘and’) and the verbal forms appear in the second-person plural. One should note that Lithuanian here is similar to many other languages where this phrase has become popular without the repetition and with the conjunction, cf. English take up and read, German nimm und lies, French prends et lis, Italian prendi e leggi, Polish bierz i czytaj, etc. The phrase of Mažvydas is different, however, in that it is used for the personification: the voice of the preface is attributed to the book and this is the reason why the pronominal form mani ‘me’ (accusative) was added; this rhetorical device is also known from some other sixteenth-century books. The added pronoun points to the most important part of the book, the catechism; the included hymns are referred to only once and a short primer, which appears after the preface, is never mentioned. The verbal forms are in second-person plural because the addressee of Mažvydas are plural, the brothers and sisters (BRalei ſeſeris). It is well known that Augustine was one of the most widely published and studied authors in the sixteenth century, a figure of high importance to the Reformation movement, and there are no doubts that Mažvydas was familiar with his works. Many authors of that time would use more or less known phrases in their own texts; some of them would be exact quotations accompanied by references while some would be modified to the needs of the author and bear no indication to their source. At this time we do not know if Mažvydas had really studied Augustine Confessions and we even cannot tell if the phrase tolle lege reached him directly or indirectly. If it reached him indirectly, might it had been already modified into a personified form? Despite the similarities of the phrases, we should be also rather cautious not to reject the possibility that we are dealing with a mere coincidence.

The abundance of Bible citations in old Lithuanian writings makes it difficult to study their relationships. A user-friendly data platform is required to allow the Bible lines to be grouped according to the characteristics interesting to the researcher. The assessment of similarity of citations is the most problematic. An integrated analysis of vocabulary, syntax, and morphology (and in some cases—spelling) allows it, but this kind of philological research is slow and currently impossible to automate. We succeeded in automating the comparison with a cyclic algorithm. The task of the algorithm is to detect identical compounds in two character sequences and to calculate which part of the compared sequences they cover. The effect of the algorithm and the calculated percentages are mainly determined by the length of the lines, the shortest sequence allowed to be compared, and the transliteration accuracy. Different lengths of the lines (a biblical line can be quoted as a fragment that is comparable to the full line) require the consideration of the chronology of the sources and the selection of corresponding comparative calculation parameters. The most optimal shortest comparable character sequence was determined experimentally. The automation of the comparison is hindered by the ambiguous orthography of old writings. It is levelled by the rules of transliteration, the application of which is differentiated according to the most important consistent spelling characteristics of each author. After evaluating the manually and automatically transliterated lines, it was determined that the transliteration method did not have any significant effect on the results. The results can be controversial when comparing the texts written in different dialects (the levelling of

Der spezifische Gebrauch des Graphems <y> im ersten Teil von Knyga nobažnystės (in der wiederholten Ausgabe von 1684?, weiterhin KNG2) zeichnet diesen Text gegenüber anderen zeitgenössischen Schriften aus. Aus der Analyse der Verwendungsfälle von <y> ergeben sich einige Hypothesen, die im Aufsatz näher analysiert werden. Unter dem Einfluss der polnischen Rechtschreibung haben die Bearbeiter versucht, dem Graphem <y>, welches als eine nicht konsequent eingesetzte Variante von <i> zu betrachten ist, eine genauere Funktion zuzuordnen. In der ersten Hälfte des Werkes (und somit im Großteil des Psalmenbuchs) wurde das Schriftzeichen <y> anscheinend zur Kennzeichnung von [i] (selten [ī]) vor „härteren“ Konsonanten t, p, d, v, s, r, m, n eingesetzt, um der etwas härteren Aussprache dieser Konsonanten vor den Vokalen der e-Gruppe und ihrer häufigen Schreibung ohne das Palatalisierungs-i Rechnung zu tragen. Die Konjunktion ir ‘und’ wurde in Anlehnung an die Schreibung der gleichbedeutenden polnischen Konjunktion (y) ebenfalls mit <y> geschrieben. Die Schreibung <y> hätte auch durch die hypothetisch angenommene ungespannte und etwas breitere Aussprache von i in unbetonten oder in akzentuierten aber nicht verlängerten Positionen (vergleichbar mit der Aussprache in den heutigen Dialekten in der Gegend von Kėdainiai) bedingt sein können. Deswegen ist die Möglichkeit in Erwägung zu ziehen, dass das Graphem <y> in KNG2 am häufigsten zur Kennzeichnung des weniger gespannten [i] eingesetzt wurde, allerdings nur in der Umgebung „härterer“ Konsonanten. Andererseits hätte die Schreibung <y> statt <i> (mit Ausnahme von yr) auch ästhetisch motiviert sein können: so hat man sich gewissermaßen an die Ober- und Unterlängen der Schriftzeichen t, p, d, ſ, k angepasst. Im KNG2 wurde neben einem solchen Buchstaben meistens das Graphem <y> gesetzt (am konsequentesten nach t, p und d in bestimmten Stämmen). Die Anpassung des Graphems <y> hätte auch ein Stilmerkmal eines der Bearbeiter von KNG2 sein können, welcher die ersten hundert Seiten des Gesangbuches abgeschrieben und korrigiert hat. Die nicht konsequente Verwendung von <y> in gewissen Stellungen zeigt, dass die Erweiterung seines Verwendungsbereichs nicht an einem einzigen Zeitpunkt zustande kam, sondern möglicherweise beim wiederholten Lesen der zu bearbeitenden Texte ergänzt wurde. Dieses für die KNG2 so kennzeichnende Schriftzeichen gehört allerdings nicht zu den typischen Merkmalen der Übersetzung des Neuen Testaments von 1701, die zum Teil von Samuel Bittner angefertigt wurde, welcher auch an der Bearbeitung von KNG2 beteiligt war.

Among the text samples from foreign languages in his Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668), John Wilkins prints an Old Lithuanian Lord’s prayer whose source is unknown. According to Andreas Müller (1680) it was taken from the ‘London Bible’, i.e., Samuel Bogusław Chyliński’s Old Lithuanian Bible translation of which only a part of the Old Testament had ever been printed (1660–1662). A comparison of Wilkins’ text, here edited for the first time, with all relevant Lithuanian versions of the Lord’s Prayer shows that Chyliński’s handwritten translation of Matthew is indeed the version closest to Wilkins’ text. But the differences, however slight, are significant: Wilkins, who did not speak Lithuanian, could not have modified the text in this way. Taken together, the facts point to the conclusion that Chyliński wrote down an ad hoc translation of the Lord’s Prayer for Wilkins. Johannes Bretke’s spontaneous new translation of a Bible passage in an album entry of 1599 thus would not be an isolated case.

The archive of the Franciscan monastery in Kretinga has preserved many documents of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Certain papers in these documents contain prominent manufacturers’ stamps, and their comparison to such stamps in the manuscripts of Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) made it possible to determine the time of compilation of Great Polish-Lithuanian Dictionary by Simonas Daukantas (1793–1864) more precisely. The stamp “ФАБРИКИ № ... АРИСТАРХОВА” of Daukantas’s dictionary was also used by Tolstoy most probably starting from 1852, especially since 1853, and in the monastery of Kretinga—since 1853. Such dating suggests that the Great Polish-Lithuanian Dictionary may have been started in 1853, although more cautious judgment would make it 1852. In such way, it is safe to claim that the Great Polish-Lithuanian Dictionary by Simonas Daukantas can be carefully dated 1852–1856 (certain corrections also appeared in 1857–1858).

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Lithuanian Catholic community still used the Gospels (in the narrow sense) or pericops translated in the seventeenth century. The book Ewangelie Polskie y litewskie by Jonas Jaknavičius, which was first published in 1647, remained popular until the middle of the nineteenth century, it had ten or eleven editions during the period of 1803–1859. The aim of the article is to discuss the relation between the New Testament, published by the Bishop Juozapas Arnulfas Giedraitis in Vilnius in 1816, and the above-mentioned editions of the Gospels, to detect whether the Gospels were based on Giedraitis’s New Testament. The edition of the Gospels printed in 1819 differed slightly from the previous edition of 1805. It was prepared on the basis of previous Gospel editions, but not on the New Testament. This was revealed by identic errors, same text lines missed. Some missed text lines in the edition of 1819 or later editions were rebuilt according to previous Gospel editions, but not according to the New Testament. Until 1856, the Gospels were reprinted without major changes without taking into account the New Testament of 1816. Bibliographers assigned the edition of the Gospels of 1858 to Jaknavičius’s works, but it is not, however, to be regarded as a new edition of Jaknavičius’s Gospels. The features of vocabulary, syntax, morphology, phonetics, and orthography show that the edition of 1858 was based not on the earlier Gospels, but on the New Testament of 1816. The unknown compiler of the Gospels of 1858 used some of the previous editions as well: retained their structure; at the beginning of the gospel fragments inserted some initial words that coincided with previous editions, used words from previous editions. Since the Gospels in 1805–1856 were published without major changes, substantial similarity of the Gospels of 1858 to any of previous editions was not detected. In the edition of the Gospels of 1858, there are some features of the Samogitian (Lowland Lithuanian) dialect. For example, although the entire book is dominated by forms with Highlander <e> [ė], <uo> [uo], forms with Samogitian <ie> [ie], <ou> [ọu] also occur. Thus, the compiler of the Gospels of 1858 must have been a Samogitian, probably from the western part of North Samogitians. It is likely that the intention to prepare a new edition of Gospels, based on the New Testament of 1816, did arise in the milieu of Bishop Motiejus Valančius.

The article presents the part of the written legacy of Davainis-Silvestraitis that had not yet been published and not included into the scientific circulation – his diary written in 1904–1911, aimed at overviewing the development of the Lithuanian national movement and to evaluate the national-social activities of the Lithuanian intellectuals in Vilnius. Davainis-Silvestraitis positioned himself as a public figure for whom the description of the events of the Lithuanian national movement had to be more important than himself or his personal experiences. However, the diary of Davainis-Silvestraitis that started as being written to others, very quickly became the diary for “self” which is primarily a more interesting material for reconstruction of his own life rather than the assessment of the Lithuanian national activities in Vilnius. The diary of Davainis-Silvestraitis perfectly reveals the difficult living and livelihood opportunities for Lithuanian intellectuals in Vilnius, whose main occupation was publicist activities. In his diary, Davainis-Silvestraitis simply “drowns” among the descriptions of his unsuccessful attempts to secure material well-being working in the Vilniaus žinios bookstore, writing articles and collecting adverts for the Lietuvių laikraštis newspaper. The descriptions of the Lithuanian national activities in Vilnius in the diary of Davainis- Silvestraitis are more like a documentary chronicle of events, rather than a deeper assessment of the phenomena and processes of the Lithuanian national movement, although he himself was often a participant of the events he was describing. Davainis-Silvestraitis presented his observations solely about the circumstances surrounding the signing of the “Lithuanian Memorandum to the Russian Prime Minister, Count S. Vitte” (1905), raising a hypothesis that the issue of the Suwalki Gubernia encouraged at least some of the Russian Empire representatives to have quite a favourable view on the appearance of this document. In his diary, Davainis-Silvestraitis suggested that some of the nobility representatives who supported the Lithuanian national movement had even visited the Great Seimas of Vilnius and that further cooperation was “deterred” by the position of some Lithuanian political parties and groups regarding the issue of land redistribution.

The edition of the first Lithuanian songbook Dainos oder Litthauische Volkslieder (Königsberg, 1825) prepared by Königsberg University Professor and the Head of the Lithuanian Language Seminar Martynas Liudvikas Rėza is still raising questions. Some may be answered by sources kept in Weimar: Goethe and Schiller archives, Duchess Anna Amalia Library and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s private library at the Goethe’s house-museum. These sources are poorly investigated, published only in a fragmentary way and some have not yet been translated into Lithuanian. The investigation of the circumstances of the collection reveals details that were unknown or underestimated, for example, that the preparation of the Rėza collection was pushed by Abraham Jakob Penzel’s plans to prepare a Lithuanian song collection and to ask for Goethe’s support, as well as the circumstances of how and when Goethe received the manuscript of the collection from Königsberg and why he did not reply to Rėza. It also reveals some of the circumstances of preparation of the collection, methodology and subsequent Rėza’s plans that were not implemented. Some questions also remain unanswered: when, under what circumstances, and for what purpose was an identical song edition published in Leipzig in 1827 and how did it reach the library of Duchess Anna Amalia.