Phonetic and morphological characteristics of handwritten translation of the Gospel of Luke into the Udmurt language

Introduction. The article describes the phonetic and morphological features of one of the translations of the Gospel of Luke into the Udmurt language of the early XIX century. The main purpose of the study is to determine the dialect basis of the written monument using the identified phonetic and morphological phenomena.
Materials and Methods. The source base of the research is the corpus of the handwritten text “St. Luke’s Holy Gospel” in the Udmurt language, which is stored in the Saint-Petersburg branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The main methods of the research are descriptive and comparative.
Results and Discussion. During the research, there were identified various phonetic and morphological characteristics inherent in the language of this written monument. Among them, the following can be noted: progressive labial distant assimilation; the loss of the final vowel of the base ы of verbs of the I conjugation before the subjunctive mood indicator, the infinitive marker and the formants of some adverbs; the functioning of the forms of ordinal numerals, as well as verbs ending in personal indicators -мы, -ды, -зы, with emphasis not on the last syllable of the word; the use of personally possessive markers with an i-vowel in words denoting terms of closest relationship; the formation of accusative forms of the plural number of simple declension using the suffix -ты; marking of forms of the reflexive voice from verbs of the I conjugation with the final -ты- basis indicator -чк-, etc.
Conclusion. Most of the phenomena identified in the source turned out to be archaic in origin. However, there are also innovative features in the monument, which make it possible to state that the dialect of the northern dialect of the Udmurt language was used for the preparation of the manuscript.