Special features of case marking forms in the first printed New Testament in the Udmurt language

Introduction. This article considers the nominal case markers in the first printed New Testament in the Udmurt language. These manuscripts are known as the first sources for studying the process of the case system formation, as well as the morphology of the Udmurt language as a whole. Materials and Methods. The research was conducted on the basis of the corpus of the texts published in 1847, which comprise Gospels of Matthew and Mark translated in the Glazov and Sarapul dialects of the Udmurt language. The analysis was carried out by comparing the linguistic material of the written sources with the data of the Standard Udmurt language and its dialects. Results and Discussion. During the study, three main features were identified in the case indicators of monuments: a) formation of accusative plural forms in the simple declension in all sources with the help of the marker -ызъ; b) use of the forms with the initial и in the first books instead of ы-forms in Standard Udmurt in the instrumental, inessive, elative and prolative cases; c) the presence of the marker -энъ in the text of the New Testament in the Sarapul dialect, alongside with the common suffix -ынъ, which serves as the means for building nominal plural forms in the instrumental case. In addition, the manuscripts in the Glazov dialect demonstrate forms of secondary local cases, as well as instances of using egressive forms in the function of elative. Conclusion. Analysis of the case markers in the first Udmurt New Testament demonstrated special features of different nature, which can be explained by orthography as well as dialectal features of the studied sources.