Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. Vol. 1. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 24)

Lajos Szőke: Aspects of liturgical languages in Europe

of Hesychasm. The "Atticizing" tendency aimed at a purified literary language has been trying to revive the standards of Attic Greek since the first century A.D. This archaizing style was only intensified by the Hesychastic attitude to language according to which a word itself was the essence of the phenomenon. It was not an abstraction which could be substituted by any synonym. The consequence of this theory has been seen for centuries in Orthodox territories. The Slavonic and Greek languages were not far removed in structure and lexis from the liturgical languages, and when copying the manuscripts local elements could get into the text. After centuries these seemingly small changes amounted to considerable alteration. Hesychasm and the "Atticizing-movement" created a kind of natural strain slowing down the changes. These Greek developments had a strong impact on Church-Slavic in Bulgaria and Russia (Second South Slavic Influence). Grammarians and Church-leaders tried to create a uniform Church Slavic following the Cyrillo-Methodian models and in this way purify it from Bulgarian, Serbian and Russian elements (see: Talev, 1973.) Members of one generation did not feel the influence of the local language in the texts and might have thought the alterations brought into the canonical Church-Slavic by Church authorities in the 17th century to be heretical. This reform and misunderstanding of the reform caused a serious crisis in Russia, splitting up the Orthodox Church and depriving one part of the population from essential human rights (Old believers). Both opposing parties thought that by changing the sacred text they changed the meaning of the whole, only their perspectives were different: the Old believers - from the perspective of the present, the reformers (Nikonians) from the perspective of past. In effect, Hesychasm theory has similar views with modern conceptions about poetical language but, at the same time, some of its ideas can be traced back to Panini. They have in common the concept that not only the elements but their structure and hierarchy jointly make up the "work" - literary or mystical. A component of a structure can be songs (sounds), words (graphic signs, sentences and other visual or aural signs. (LaBauve), 1992:240-246). The hypersemantyc meaning postulated by modern linguists for poetic 145