THE “ETYMOLOGICAL” EXPLANATIONS IN BRUNO’S COMMENTATED PSALTER AND THEIR SLAVONIC EQUIVALENTS

  Unlike its modern counterpart, Latin Medieval etymology, being mainly related to allegorical exegesis and interested in the theological interpretation of the Holy Scripture, aimed at detecting the proper meaning of words in order to extract the spiritual sense from the literal text. This led to a particular method of analyzing words, partly inherited from antiquity, which freely operated with linguistic items (words, syllables or even single letters), without paying any attention to phonetic laws: one encounters such “etymological” attempts as dolor enim dictus quasi domabilis horror — “pain is said to be a dread that may be tamed”, where in the two syllables of the lexeme dolor the partial presence of two other words is recognized. The present paper features a list of such explanations, as they occur in the commentated Psalter by Bruno of Würzburg (11th cen- tury), and their Slavonic translation, done by Dmitriy Gerasimov in the middle of the 16th century. Because of the particular nature of these comparisons, based on sound similarity, in the Slavonic translation the formal connection between the explicandum and theexplicans is in most cases completely lost. Nevertheless, the collected material, here published for the first time, clearly shows the many-faceted significance of the cultural and linguistic dialogue between Russia and the Western world.