A Further Note on Turkic Lexical Elements in the "Slovo o polku Igoreve" and the "Zadonščina"

SEER,TVol. 82, ,0o. i, JanUar 2004 Marginalia A FurtherNote on TurkicLexicalElementsin the Slovo opolku Igoreve andthe Zadonscina NICHOLAS POPPE, JR IN his three-and-a-half page note (SEER, 8o, 2002, 3, PP. 479-82), EdwardL. Keenan arguesagainstthe antiquityof the Slovo, and denies thatthe Turkiclexical elementsin the Zadonscina (writtenmostprobably in the I380s)showthatit is secondaryto the Slovo. 1In doing so, Keenan challengesboth Roman Jakobson and the 'scholarlytradition'- built upon the publications of the Turcologists P. M. Melioranskij,F. E. Kors, and K. H. Menges, who have investigatedthe Turkicvocabulary of the Slovo. The archaic Turkiclexical elements in the Slovo have alwaysbeen a thorny problem for sceptics who have denied its antiquity and its authenticity.As a rule, the scepticssimplydisregardedthem.A. Mazon did offeran ingenious,yet infelicitous,explanationfortheirpresencein the Slovo: I1est permis d'imaginerque ces termespeuvent avoir ete importespar des catechumenes d'origineturco-tatarecomme en comptait cette region de la Russie sud-occidentale et galicienne ou le texte original semble avoir et& &crit.2 Eventually,however,Mazon disavowedthisinapttheory,and acknowledged that he had no explanationforthe presence of the Turkiclexical elements in the Slovo.3 In more recenttimes,A. A. Zimin unsuccessfully attempted to deny the antiquity of the Turkic lexical content of the Slovo.4 In his note, Keenan takes a different stance, arguing that words which have been identifiedas Turkicborrowingsare, in reality, 'ghost words', 'nonce inventions'by the presumedeighteenth-centuryauthor of the Slovo, and 'misreadingsby the editor'.Nevertheless,he acknowledges that in additionto toponyms and propernames of Turkicorigin, Nicholas Poppe, Jr is Associate Professor Emeritus of Slavonic Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada. ' See N. Poppe, Jr, 'ANote on Turkic Lexical Elements in the SlovoopolkuIgoreve and the .Zadons`cina', 7he Slavonicand East EuropeanReview,79, 2001, 2 (hereafter, 'Turkic Lexical Elements'), pp. 20I-I I. 2 See R. Jakobson, Selected WVritings, 4, The Hague, I966, p. 750. I See A. N. Robinson, '0 zadacach sblizenija slavistieskoj i tjurkologieskoj tradicij v izu&eniiSlovaopolkuIgoreve', in 0. A. Derzavina (ed.), Pamjatniki literaturg i iskusstva XI-XI II vekov, MIoscow, I978, p. 206. 4 See 'Turkic Lexical Elements', p. 204. NICHOLAS POPPE, JR 75 the Slovocontains some Turkic loan words (he does not, however, identify them), but these, he claims, are so few, and well known, that they may be considered irrelevant by the sceptics, and may be disregarded(pp. 480-8 i). In this debate, it is essential that the publications of Melioranskij, Menges, and A. Zajaczkowski,are takeninto account. These arebased on much erudition and research and not, as Keenan contends, on superficialuse of Turkicdictionaries(including,for example, Radlov's, pp. 480-8 i). Menges emphasizedtheimportanceoftheextantmaterial on the Cuman (Polovcian)language for his lexicological study of the Slovo.5Zajaczkowskij,in his book on Cuman-Slavonic linguistic ties, points out that Turcology only at its modern stage, with the discovery of the CodexCumanicus (the Cuman-Latin dictionary and texts of AD I303), Mahmud al-Ka'sghari'sTurkic dictionary (written in the eleventh century),and other ancient Turkicsources,is able to elucidatethe Turkic-Polovcianelements in the SlOVo.6 The study of Altaic (Turkic) lexemes in the Slovois not a by-product of the controversy over its authenticity,instigatedfor the purposeof defending the Slovo's authenticity (p. 479). Rather, the works listed above have made a major contribution to the study of Altaic loan words in Russian,7 and are quite independent of the Mazon and Zimin controversyover the Slovo's authenticity. (Zajaczkowskijdoes mention in passing the well-known Mazon-Jakobsonpolemics, and statesthat he sidesunequivocallywith Jakobson's view.8 His book, however, was not in any way affectedby the Mazon controversy.) Keenan arguesthat the Slovo, with its Turkiclexical elements, could have been composed by an eighteenth-centuryauthor.9He assertsthat 'we cannot be surewhat they [the eighteenth-centuryscholars]did not know' about later discoveries of ancient Turkic sources (p. 480). In fact, the historiographyof Turkic studieshas been thoroughly studied and recorded, and iswell known.'0The Thesaurus Linguarum Orientalium. LexiconArabico-Persico-Turkicum of Fran,ois a Mesgnien Menifnski (i623-98), is cited as a work that could have been used by the Slovo's presumed eighteenth-century author (p. 480). However, the Turkic 5 K. G. Mienges, lostoc'nye elementvv 'Sloveo polku Igoreve',Leningrad, I979 (hereafter, Istos.nvei...

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