RUSSIAN AND CHURCH SLAVONIC: OBSERVATIONS ON THE HISTORY OF ACCENTUATION IN EDUCATIONAL BOOKS OF THE MODERN AGE

This paper examines the 18th-century textbooks typed in Church Slavonic typeface, by authors such as Th. P. Polikarpov-Orlov, Th. Maximov, Theophan (Prokopovich), Platon (Levshin), A. A. Barsov and others. These books combine Church Slavonic and Russian linguistic features or contain texts in both languages and are valuable for the study of accentology. The peculiarities of the use of superscript signs in printed editions of different years and different printing houses are described. It is shown that new educational texts are consistently accentuated solely by the positional principle (oxia and varia), whereas the practice of using the kamora by the principle of antistichus had not yet become widespread, and attempts to expand the functions of the apostrophe were not successful. The article considers, among others, a new edition of Theophan’s (Prokopovich) Primer without titlos in the texts, created in 1759 especially for the 5-year-old Prince Pavel Petrovich, which initiated simplification, in this respect, of Church Slavonic orthography for educational purposes. The history of parallel editions of Platon Levshin’s Theology, written in Russian, in civil and Church Slavonic typefaces (1765) is also studied in the paper. A comparison of these two versions of the same text leads to the conclusion that the edition printed in civil typeface was primary.