International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Viktor Savić
Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Institute for Serbian Language, Belgrade, Serbia; 
[e-mail]
A Closer Determination of Document Names 
in Serbian Monastic Charters of the 12
th
–14
th
Centuries
Terms that designate various documents, often accompanied with appropriate attributes, are 
sporadically found in Serbian medieval legal documents. Document names and attributes are less 
frequent in earlier documents, whereas in later ones they appear more often. Composite terms 
sometimes fail to provide more information than simple ones and the corresponding attributes may 
seem to be superfluous (though, along with serving as a rhetorical tool, they have a legal meaning, 
since they carry a legal message). However, there are also cases when only the use of attributes 
makes it possible to get comprehensive information about the designated concept. Adjectival words 
(adjectives and adjectival pronouns) are not the only means of determining the designated concept. 
This function is also fulfilled by appropriate case forms (with prepositions and without them), other 
nouns, and even more complex structures. Therefore, it is necessary to highlight this phenomenon 
from a philological perspective. Our study primarily focuses on the documents from the time 
of the Nemanjić dynasty. Nevertheless, in order to throw additional light on the problem, or to 
improve already defined concepts, our analysis will not be restricted to these documents, nor will 
it be limited to the genre of monastic charters. Our approach relies on the traditional philological 
methodology combined with lexical semantic analysis and syntactic parsing of the medieval 
terminological apparatus. Examples are cited profusely throughout the study. All these elements 
are subordinated to the historiographical cognitive model. The paper also offers an overview and 
analysis of the total body of materials extracted from the limited Serbian medieval corpus, while 
determining chronologically, to the extent possible, the observed phenomena. In this context, 
the issue of congruent attributes (from simple units, such as 
sija
knjiga to 
zlatopečatna
povelja → 
hrisovulja ... → slovo, which was formed by calquing, to developed formulae, such as 
blagoobrazni
and 
ch’stni zlatopečatni
hrisovul) is particularly interesting. The determinative 
zlatopečatni
was 

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rather early semantically emptied, as it could appear in unexpected combinations (considered 
‘pleonastic’ by local historians, as compared to Byzantine diplomatics). This further weakened its 
position in symbolic terms: there arose a need for introducing additional terms that designate the 
guaranteeing value of a document, which eventually led to its omission in expected positions. Later 
qualifiers aimed at demonstrating the authenticity of a document became particularly productive 
since the reign of King Stefan Dečanski (e.g. 
nastoješti, světli, izvěstni, obični
). Although they 
had an earlier foothold in the system (
utvrždeni, istin’ni, zakon’ni
, most commonly 
zlatopečatni
), 
they remained without true equivalents in Byzantine diplomatic sources. As far as the expansion 
of this phenomenon is concerned, it seems that the Serbian legal discourse was more developed 
than its counterparts. It shared some features with Bulgarian diplomatic practice (though there 
were also significant differences, well illustrated by the well-known variant pair 
povelja
: 
orizmo
). 
Some terms that are usually considered to be tautologies are subject to our analysis (
izv
ě
stnoje
and 
vsenastoješteje
zlatopečatnoje
slovo or 
zapisanije
and 
utvrždenije
). It is also necessary to elucidate 
the occurrence of incongruent attributes with prepositional and case structures in the possessive 
genitive, as the positional variant of possessive adjectives (e.g. the relationship between hrisovul 
gospodina i otca 
mi : 
otčin 
mi hrisovul), and their occurrence beyond the cases limited by the usage 
of mandatory determinants. They are particularly common in connection with the perspective of 
the third person, when the actual auctors make reference to documents issued by their predecessors. 
Although they can be found in most documents (or rather those which date from a later period, 
or were copied in a later period), which may suggest that they were in ordinary use, they were in 
fact introduced gradually, under the influence of foreign languages (mostly Greek, which has to do 
with predefined, diplomatic formulae). A significant part of innovations in what was otherwise a 
rather small terminological corpus coincide with the period known in philology as the time of the 
so-called “subsequent Grecization”, which was a result of major cultural and social changes in Serbia 
during the reign of King Milutin.