THE CHAPTERS ON GRAMMAR IN THE “ALFAVITAR RADI UČENIJA MALYCH DETEJ”: STRUCTURE, CONTENTS, SOURCES

The paper is devoted to a 17th century primer whose author is currently considered to be Evfimij Čudovskij. It provides a detailed analysis of the structure and content of the first sections of that part of the book which is dedicated to grammar, commenting on the way in which the author revised the grammar textbooks that he used as source material. The analysis demonstrates that he was an experienced educator who had a professional knowledge of didactics and knew the principles that the school curriculum was based on. It also becomes clear that the author was acquainted with the contemporary West European theories of grammar. All this casts doubt on the presumed authorship of Evfimij Čudovskij, who received no systematic school education. Further linguistic and textual analysis shows that Aldus Manutius’ Latin commentary on the Greek alphabet De literis Graecis, ac diphthongis, et quemadmodum ad nos ueniant, which accompanied the editions of Constantine Laskaris’ Greek grammar, was used as a source. In 1687 the Lichudes brothers compiled an abridged version of Laskaris’ grammar offering their own explanations of certain linguistic phe- nomena and whole sentences of these are reproduced nearly verbatim in the primer. The paper concludes by arguing that the conception of this primer belonged to the Lichudes, that it was conceived as they were studying Old Church Slavonic using Smotryc'kyj’s grammar, possibly with the help of Evfimij Čudovskij. I suggest that Evfimij was a source of the Slavic data for the book, but not its author.