Kada lietuviškų sutartinių sodautõ tipo priedainiai prarado prasmę?

Abstract

It has been commonly assumed that sodauto type refrains of the Lithuanian sutartinė folk songs are non-semantic and have no actual meaning, although some of them could be associated with such Lithuanian words as rūta „rue", linas „line, flax", etc. Despite such similarity, it is the systematic „ending" -õ (dial. -ထ) in these refrains that deserves closer analysis. It could indicate the ancient Baltic and Indo-European singular Nominative feminine (sg. Nom. fem.) ending -ā with acute intonation. As a rule, Lithuanian words with the ancient acute intonation in sg. Nom. fem. ending -ā were affected by the Leskien Law in the 12-13th centuries which changed them into a short -à (or -ó- in closed position, e.g. *(galv)-ā > (galv)-à, *(ger)-ā-jī > (ger)-ó-ji). The „ending" -õ (in dialects -ā) (with the circumflex intonation) found in refrains suggests that the refrains were already nonsemantic (meaning free) before the Leskien Law came into force, because they were seen as no more belonging to the system of the words containing the feminine acute ending -ā that changed into -à under the influence of this law. Otherwise, if these refrains had belonged to that same group of words with meaning (like *(galv)-ā) during the period of the Leskien Law, they would have been representing the ending of the type *(sodaut)-ā. Thus, it can be assumed that the refrains could have lost the meaning much earlier than the Leskien Law came into force (12-13th century).