Old Church Slavonic Elements in the Code of Emperor Dušan (1349, 1353/1354)

The paper traces Old Church Slavonic elements in the Code of Emperor Dušan, a legal monument written in the vernacular, Old Serbian language. Before the end of the 14th century and especially in the 15th century, the text of the Code was subjected to subsequent archaization, with the aim of increasing the share of Old Church Slavonic elements in the linguistic structure, which reflected the spirit of the time, different from the period in which the codex had been compiled. In this context, the paper seeks to determine the real presence of this linguistically marked phenomenon and its function in the text, before the upper chronological limit, set by the oldest surviving manuscript copy in physical terms, the Struga manuscript (ca. 1395). The study compares the situation in the manuscript copies of the older recension, especially in those that were not exposed to major linguistic changes. It is established that during the earliest development of the manuscript tradition of Emperor Dušan’s Code (i.e. the first fifty years after its had been compiled), the Old Church Slavonic phonetics, accompanied by morphology to a limited extent, was the basic means of increasing expressiveness (however, Old Church Slavonic morphological means were hardly at all used in the protograph). The Old Church Slavonic vocabulary present in the Code of Emperor Dušan was generally not phonetically marked; it was in every respect adjusted to the vernacular language system. The use of elements adopted from Old Church Slavonic was, above all, determined by the topic, i.e. it was limited to a particular subject. These elements are not scattered throughout the text, but are mostly concentrated in the legal provisions concerning church law, usually with reliance on the so-called Code of the Holy Fathers. As it turns out, elements of Old Church Slavonic from various linguistic levels are not widely present in the original text of the Code of Emperor Dušan. This presumably reflects the situation in the Old Serbian language of the time, although the language of this legal monument is administrative and not colloquial.