Preface to the Nyasvizhian Catechism of 1562 in the Light of Lexical Statistics of the Work

Abstract

The article deals with the lexical structure of a small work of early Belarusian writing which was written in the Cyrillic script and which has never been investigated before. The discussion concentrates particularly on the following aspects: the rate of words in the text, lexical explication of the main subjects, repeatability of roots in the lexicon, lexical syntagmatics within the text and cases of rhetorical synonimisation. The work is characterised as a religious and rhetorical one. Even though three persons appear as its authors, the analysis has shown that most likely there is one author, and namely Lauren Kryszkouski, who apparently wrote the work originally in Polish, whereas Szymon Budny translated this work into Old Belarusian.