Vocabulary of Ukrainian letters of the 14th Century in the “Dictionary of the Old Russian Language (11th–14th Centuries)”
Yurii Osinchuk, Candidate of Sciences in Philology, Senior Researcher, Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Ukrainian Language
I. Krypiakevych Institute of Ukrainian Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
4 Kozelnytska St., Lviv 79026, Ukraine
E-mail: osinchuk@gmail.com
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4045-1044
Heading: Articles
Language: Ukrainian
Abstract: The article examines the vocabulary of fourteenth-century Ukrainian charters that were incorporated into the source base of the Dictionary of the Old East Slavic Language of the 11th–14th centuries. The lexicographic treatment of the language of fourteenth-century charters was also undertaken by the compilers of the Dictionary of the Old Ukrainian Language of the 14th–15th centuries, edited by L. Humetska.
Ukrainian lexical items attested in charters were frequently used in the Russian dictionary to demonstrate the presumed antiquity of Russian vocabulary. The headword inventory of the Dictionary of the Old East Slavic Language of the 11th–14th centuries is supplemented by lexemes drawn from Ukrainian charters. A number of headwords are documented with two, three, four, or more illustrative citations exclusively from Ukrainian charters. The dictionary register also includes a certain number of borrowings originating from Old Ukrainian charters. In several polysemous lexemes, one of the meanings or sub-meanings is interpreted solely on the basis of the analyzed texts, while a number of dictionary entries representing first attestations are illustrated exclusively by examples from charters. In the published volumes of the Dictionary of the Old East Slavic Language of the 11th–14th centuries, particular scholarly value is attached to lexical items from Ukrainian charters that are not characteristic of the Russian language but remain productive in Ukrainian. Ukrainian charters provide evidence for nominative word combinations of various structural types recorded in the dictionary entries of the Russian dictionary. They also document a range of personal and geographical names of deverbal and denominal origin. Within the corpus of anthroponymic vocabulary, the analyzed administrative texts extensively attest the names of Ukrainian townspeople in vernacular Ukrainian phonetic, morphological, and derivational forms.
Fourteenth-century Ukrainian charters attest to the core linguistic features of Ukrainian that had already become clearly established by that period and that distinguish Ukrainian as an independent linguistic system within the Slavic world.
Keywords: charters, vocabulary, linguistic features, headword, historical dictionary.
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Received 12.01.2026 Аpproved 19.03.2026 Рublished 00.04.2026