Phonetic features of the “Life of St. Theodore” (1913) written in the Udmurt language
The article describes the vowel and consonant features of the translation of the “Life of St. Theodoreˮ (1913) into the Elabuga dialect of the Udmurt language. The phonetic isoglosses of the written record could not be considered without taking into account its script and spelling system; therefore, the article also pays special attention to the script and orthography of the source material.The phonetic features are described by comparing the vowel and consonant system of the “Life of St. Theodoreˮ with the vowel and consonant system of the modern Udmurt literary language, adding, whenever available, correspondences from the dialect dictionary byY. Wichmann [Wichmann 1987], the materials for which were collected at the end of the 19th century. Furthermore, corresponding modern forms from the audio dictionaries based on 2013 field data are also indicated. Such a comparison makes it possible to try to determine the archaic or innovative nature of each feature identified at the phonetic level.The analysis shows that, in general, “Life of St. Theodoreˮ (1913), in comparison with earlier translated records, has a clear script and spelling system along with certain spelling rules for various parts of speech. As for the phonetic features, almost all of them remain to various extents in the modern Central-Southern Udmurt dialect. However, based on modern dialect data, it turns out to be difficult to determine more precisely which of the Central-Southern dialects was used in this record as, unfortunately, the subdialects of this area are described rather poorly today.