The inflectional system of the 1804 document in Livvi Karelian: A corpus-based analysis

The article analyzes the inflectional system of the 1804 “Translation of several prayers and an abridged catechism into the Olonets language”, the earliest known printed translated text in the Livvi dialect of the Karelian language. Using the method of corpus dialectology, 1,502 word forms were analyzed: 1,098 nominal forms (534 nouns, 355 pronouns, 142 adjectives, and 67 numerals) and 404 verbal forms (56% finite and 44% non-finite). The corpus data were compared with dialectological questionnaire materials from 1937–1948 covering 45 localities in southern Karelia (the Murreh database). The following dialectal isoglosses were identified: the allative endings -le, -lѣ and -llе; the abessive marker -tа; the postpositional comitative with kеlѧ; the 3rd-person singular present-tense marker -въ; conditional affixes with sibilants (-iži-/-jži-, -ži-, -išъ, -žъ); first-infinitive forms of single-stem verbs with stem in -i; the formant -ju of the present active participle in single-stem polysyllabic verbs; and the marker -nүtъ/-njutъ of the past active participle. Taken together, these features localize the source dialect within the Olonets group of the Livvi dialect and confirm the stability of its morphological system from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century.