Chronicles Reconstruction by A.A. Shakhmatov: To the Problem of Reliability

The name of A.A. Shakhmatov was firmly entrenched in the theory of the Church Slavonic basis of the Russian literary language. In this regard, the unique work of Shakhmatov on the restoration of the texts of the oldest chronicles deserves special attention, where genetically correlating reflexes of pre-Slavic combinations included in the list of the most reliable diagnostic signs are presented as a marker of the South Slavic and East Slavic elements. The textual and statistical analysis of the specifics of fixing genetically correlative reflexes indicates the differences in various reflex groups in the restored texts, as well as the discrepancies within the groups in accordance with the features that Shakhmatov noted in the suggested classification of Church Slavonic and Russian correspondences. When compared to Povest' Vremennykh Let (Russian Primary Chronicle, A Tale of Bygone Years), the reconstructed texts demonstrated prevalence of pleophonic root usage over non-pleophonic one. The groups *dj, *tj with the main tendency towards homogeneity in formations with a complete morphological paradigm (respectively in the South Slavic and East Slavic design) are quite diverse in the groups of "individual words" identified by Shakhmatov. In accordance with this, a characteristic feature of the reconstructed texts is their general heterogeneity, including the combination of genetically heterogeneous elements within closely related contexts, which contradicts the conception of the Church-Slavonic nature of West-Slavonic literary language.