COMMON INDO-EUROPEAN POETIC HERITAGE: METHODOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES OF CORPUS RESEARCH

Abstract

Indo-European studies as a branch of linguistics is one of the oldest and most soundly grounded. Its main achievement consists in phonetic laws and phonetic correspondences between related languages. Due to these laws, it is possible to reconstruct the grammatical structure of Indo-European language, its set of morphological formants, vocabulary, features of syntax, prosody, etc. All this made it possible to reconstruct the higher levels of speech organization – poetic cliches. In the oldest texts of Indo-European languages (Pindaric odes, Homeric epics, hymns of the Rigveda and Avesta, Hittite texts, etc.), there are expressions, which consist of etymologically related words. Therefore, in the middle of the 19th century it became clear that some phrases of the Indo-European poetic (ritual) language could also be preserved in the daughter folklore (and later – poetic and literary) traditions. This field of study was started by the German philologist Adalbert Kuhn in 1853, when he showed that in both ancient Greek and Vedic texts there is a stable combination of two etymologically related words – “unfading glory”. The discovery of the next common Indo-European formula (“wheel of the sun”) belongs to the same linguist. Today, more than 50 such phrases are known. These are remnants of the common Indo-European poetic language. They have preserved the most important ideologemes and mythologemes of Indo-European elites: “fast horses”, “horses and men”, “giver of goods” (about a deity), “immortal sky, “long-lived sky”, “sky-father”, “daughter of heaven”, “celestial morning star”, “with bad / good glory”, “glory of men”, “great glory”, “wide glory” and others. The classic compendium “Dichtung und Dichtersprache in indogermanischer Zeit” was published by R. Schmitt in 1967. Since then, the procedure for reconstructing common Indo-European poetic formulas has not changed significantly: the researcher reads texts in ancient languages and, relying only on his memory, finds in them sequences of etymologically related words, and suggests that they reflect combinations that existed already at the Indo- European stage. The present article theoretically substantiates the possibility of applying corpus approaches to the identification of common Indo-European poetic clichés, which on practice has already been partially implemented in previous publications of the author.