Abstract:In the eighteenth century, songs of two essentially different types of culture were present in the repertory of the Estonian-speaking community: folksongs and hymns. The old tradition of folksongs (regilaul or runosong) representing the indigenous oral culture was still alive. At the same time, since the sixteenth century, more and more elements of European (Christian) written culture had penetrated into the mental world of Estonians. The structures of literary language (and thinking based on written texts in a broader sense) were transferred into Estonian mainly by means of translations of ecclesiastical literature. For certain socio-historical reasons, influences of literacy may have mainly reached Estonians through the translations of Lutheran hymns, which became especially popular in the eighteenth century. This was the century in which structures of indigenous oral culture and those of European written culture probably still functioned in the mental world of Estonians separately from each other. Only in the nineteenth century the two sets fused into literary Estonian, and the modern Estonian culture was born. In order to understand the mechanics of the genesis of modern Estonian, the present article juxtaposes the sublanguages representing the situation in the eighteenth century (prior to the fusion). The text-corpora of folksongs and Lutheran hymn translations are analysed on lexical, morphological, and morphosyntactical levels.Keywords: grammatical phrases, language history, lexis, Lutheran hymns, morphological categories, runosong, written versus oral culture, word frequency JUXTAPOSED SUBLANGUAGES AND TEXT CORPORAThe aim of the following juxtaposition is to explain the structure and mutual relations between two eighteenth century sublanguages of Estonian: the sublanguage of folksongs representing the indigenous oral culture, and the sublanguage of Lutheran hymn translations representing the written ecclesiastical culture. Both variants were poetic languages, many features of which relied on the metrical and poetic system in which they functioned. However, in the present paper prosody and strictly poetic circumstances will be disregarded and both sublanguages will be analysed first and foremost from the lexical and
The full version of the Bible was first published in Estonian in 1739. In comparison with the neighbouring Protestant countries this is a very late date. However, serious attempts to translate the Bible into Estonian were made already in the 17th century. There are two manuscripts from the 17th century which contain translations of the Old Testament. The older manuscript dating from the middle of the century has been – unlike e.g. the Finnish Bible which had been translated from Luther’s German version – translated directly from Hebrew, by Johannes Gutslaff. Also the 1739 Estonian version was translated directly from the Hebrew version. As is widely known, Luther was of the opinion that a translator should not follow the structure of the source language&&instead, he must use the fluent and pure target language. The Estonian translations followed strictly the Hebrew version, which resulted in the fact that still today, Estonian phraseology has Hebrew influence.
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