The paper analyzes certain phonological characteristics of the Accounting
Ledger Journal of the Church of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, the
document that has been kept under this name in the said church in Arad
(under the signature INV 794). The document contains two protocols: the first one that was kept from 1728 until 1782 and the second one kept from 1776
until 1790. This paper analyzes the corpus from the first half of the 18th
century (more precisely, the time period from 1728 until 1752). Since this
is a text that encompasses two periods on the timeline: (1) the period in
which Russian-Slavonic substituted Serbian-Slavonic and (2) the period in
which Slavonic-Serbian was established and in which it existed - the basic
task of this research is the identification of the language in which the
Accounting Ledger Journal was written. In the paper, special attention is
paid to the relation between vernacular and literary elements in the
analyzed document, as well as to the dependence of their use on various
contextual parameters. The analysis of the selected phonological
characteristics of the Accounting Ledger Journal of the Church of the Holy
Apostles Peter and Paul (1728-1752) indicates the chronological matching
with the data from previous research of documents with a similar profile on
the territory of South Hungary. The fourth and fifth decade is, in fact,
the time that saw a more prominent penetration of Russian-Slavonic elements
into manuscripts. Their number, however, is not large enough to regard it as
a mixed language. The Accounting Ledger Journal as a whole still had a
vernacular basis, which confirms the previous assumption concerning the
elitization of folk language as the basic model for creating the
Slavonic-Serbian language in the manuscripts of the 18th century. The
analysis also shows that literary features (Serbian-Slavonic and
Russian-Slavonic) were conditioned primarily by the thematic and structural
organization of the text, as well as the social stratification of the
people mentioned in the aforementioned document.
