The article studies the rendering of the main apophatic notions in the classic Old Bulgarian literary monuments. The terms of this subsystem are presented in their conceptual and linguistic aspects and, based on this; conclusions are made for the development of the terminological layer of lexis in the Old Bulgarian language. A dictionary of the apophatic terms in the classic Old Bulgarian literary monuments is proposed. It gives the empirical basis for the research.
The article is focused, firstly, on a substantive that has remained outside the scope of study on the 9th-century Uchitel’noe evangelie – ал(ъ)кота. Its 6 appearances in this collection are observed together with their Greek corresponding words and direct respective contexts in the source and target texts. The derivatives of the same root are also traced in the monument together with their Greek counterparts. Then, a visual thesaurus is presented of the concurrent nouns with the root *alk- according to the main diachronic dictionaries. Finally, two synonymic roots – пост- and глад- are presented in terms of their distribution in the monument and their semantic peculiarities. The conclusions are that the words for hunger in Uchitel’noe evangelie are of three roots and that each of these roots has its exact Greek counterpart: глад- translates λιμ- and signifies ‘acute need for food’; пост- corresponds to νηστ- and is related to ‘voluntary deprivation of food’, and ал(ъ)к- is related to πεῖν- only in its more general meaning of ‘need for food’ (but not in its meaning related to ‘gluttony’). The word ал(ъ)кота is relatively rare in the older written monuments. Nevertheless, it completes the thesaurus of nouns with ал(ъ)к-/лак-, it is inherent in the Old Bulgarian literary language, and, in particular, in Constantine of Preslav’s language.
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