Aoristic Forms in the Seventeenth-Century Kiev Polonicas

Abstract

This paper belongs to a cycle of studies on the Polish language in Kiev. It draws on to Zofia Kurzowa’s publication, which revised some opinions on the temporal and geographic ranges of aorist and the conditional that was formed by analogy from -bych, -bychmy.

The sources here are Polish prints edited by Kiev-Pechersk Lavra. On their basis past and conditional forms have been presented, the cohesion of enclitical elements with various parts of speech and determinants of the grammatical person. Such data confirmed Kurzowa’s thesis that forms of the type robilichmy (we were doing) robilibychmy (we would do) were used much longer than only until the beginnings of the seventeenth century. What is more, they were well-known not only in the kind of Polish that was spoken in Małopolska region.