FORMS OF THE GENITIVE AND LOCATIVE CASES OF THE SINGULAR OF MASCULINE NOUNS IN THE MEDICAL BOOK OF THE 17th CENTURY

The article deals with the forms of the genitive and locative cases of masculine nouns in the medical book of the 17th century, translated from an unidentifi ed language by clerk Andrei Nikiforov in 1672. The studied manuscript (Russian State Library, fund 317, no. 8, 17th century, 254 sheets) has a high percentage of accentuation. It turned out that in the genitive case, the distribution of the endings -а and -u sometimes depends on the case meaning: the ending -а is used in the genitive of belonging and counting; the ending -u — in the genitive of time and in the partitive. In the meanings of the genitive case of a subject, object, comparison or explanation, in both meanings of the ablative, the ending-a prevails over the ending -u, while in the genitive with the meanings of cause, intensifying characteristic by material or substance or prevention of a potential threat, nouns endpredominantly in -u. The research indicates dependence in the addition of the ending -a or -u on the accent paradigm only in the ablative and the genitive case with the meaning of cause. In this case the words belonging to the accent paradigm a and the accent paradigm b predominantly have an ending -a, and words belonging to the accent paradigm c mainly have an ending -u. 
When considering the forms of the locative in the medical book, a fairly large number of non-trivial cases are of interest, where masculine nouns are used in the explanatory meaning with the preposition o and the ending -u. Comparison with business writing of the 17th century shows that this phenomenon occurs there only sporadically and only in formulaic contexts.