Transparency of morphological structures as a feature of language contact among closely related languages Markus Giger / Kalina Sutter-Voutova (Basel) 1. Introduction: The Slavonic languages at the beginning of the 19 th century At the beginning of the 19 th century, there was only one independent state built by a Slavonic nation, Russia. 1 The majority of Slavonic speaking peoples lived in the multiethnic Habsburg and Ottoman empires, most of today’s Slavonic standard languages were only on the threshold of standardization and had a rather narrow range of functional domains. The dominating elites used other languages, e. g. German in the Czech lands or Greek and/or Turk in Bulgaria. The involved nations are described by M. Hroch (Hroch 2005, 43, 199) as “socially incomplete” nations: They lack to a large extent – at the beginning – social, cultural and educational elites. This concerned Bulgarians, Byelorussians, Kashubians, Croats, Czechs, Macedonians, Slovaks, Slovenes, Sorbs, and Ukrainians. 2 In this situation, the language-question was one of the most important issues (cf. e.g. Venediktov 1981, Bělina/Pokorný 1993, 60-85) and the nationally conscious elites developed a deliberate interest in Russian and transferred linguistic devices from Russian into the individual languages 3 , in order to support the desired expansion of functional domains and to strengthen what was perceived as the “Slavonic shape” of the emerging standard language (Cooper 2010, 79). These devices were mostly lexical, but to a certain degree also grammatical (cf. Giger 2008; forthcoming). All these processes have to be seen in the context of emerging historical linguistics and especially Slavonic philology. 2. Russian influence on other Slavonic languages in the early 19 th century Lexical borrowing from Russian into other Slavonic languages in the 19 th century is quite well documented (cf. Czambel 1887; Havránek 1936, 86-96; Damerau 1960; Lägreid 1973; Sekaninová 1976; Andrejčin 1977, 126-141; Gadányi/Moiseenko 1999; Ajduković 1997, 2004). At this point it may be sufficient to show just a few examples from lexical borrowing and borrowing of word formation devices from Russian into other Slavonic languages in the 19 th century: 1) Bulgarian medleno < Russian medlenno ,slowly‘ petno < Russian pjatno ,stain‘ -tel < Russian -tel’ (suffix forming agent nouns) (Damerau 1960, 29, 93, 109) 2) Slovenian izobilje < ru. izobilie ,abundance‘ slovar < russ. slovar’ ,dictionary‘ 1 A sort of independence held also Montenegro, but as a small and at that time rather isolated country on the Balkans, it could not have a larger impact on other Slavonic languages and cultures, although it was obvolved by romantic ideas, as shows the novella “Černogorcy” by the Russian slavophile writer F. V. Bulgarin (1829/30), translated promptly into Czech by V. Hanka (1833). 2 The phenomenon was, of course, by far not restricted to Slavonic peoples and languages: Estonians, Finns, Lithuanians, Latvians, Romanians and their languages were in a similar situation. 3 This does not held, of course, for Byelorussian and Ukrainian, for which Russian was one of the languages to be distinct from.