Greek Semantic Loans in the Domain of ethos/nomos in the Rus′ Primary Chronicle

Boris Maslov, University of California, Berkeley

While it is a likely hypothesis that much of the East Slavic ethical vocabulary was formed under the influence of translations from Byzantine Greek, the precise mechanism of semantic transfer does not lend itself to a simple description. The notion of semantic loan makes is possible to distinguish, in the meaning of one lexical item, an East Slavic substratum and a superstratum, which can often be explained by the influence of Greek equivalents. With this aim in view, I compare the use of zakon, bezakonie, dobryi, mudryi, and smyslennyi in the PVL and in roughly contemporary translations from Greek (primarily, Hamartolos chronicle).