Lietuvos istorijos institutas

If register is an essential part of language description, as has been stressed in past decades, it cannot be left out of consideration in the historic stages of a language, even though we have no direct grasp of its situational-functional contexts there. Although time-consuming and methodologically challenging, this is a necessary undertaking. The paper takes up the challenge, using the examples of Old Lithuanian and Old Latvian, where the beginning of written transmission roughly coincides with the spread of the Reformation and its counter-

Three handwritten copies of an order issued by George Frederick, Margrave of Brandenburg- Ansbach, have recently come to light in the Secret State Archives Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (Berlin). Two of these, A and B, had been edited before by Jurgis Gerullis (1927), but were meanwhile considered lost. The third one, K, has been newly discovered in a file of drafts which also contained the German drafts both for the text of the order and the Duke’s accompanying letter to the church administrations of Tilsit and Ragnit. It is edited here with the variants from A, B and a photograph of the lost copy U, and together with the two German drafts. The edition is accompanied by a full commentary and glossary. George Frederick, nephew of the first Prussian duke Albert of Brandenburg, took over the administration of the Duchy of Prussia after Albert’s son had been declared unfit to rule. The order, dating from December 1578 and addressed to the church administration of Tilsit, admonishes the members of the Protestant church district of Tilsit to fulfil their obligations as Christians and refrain from heathen practices. It is the earliest extant administrative document written in Old Lithuanian.

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.