The Terms of Inheritance Law in Russia-Byzantium Treaties and Russkaya Pravda: the Problems of Functional Semantics and Derivation Relations

The article deals with the functional-and-semantic and derivational relations of the inheritance law terms in the Russia-Byzantium treaties and in Russkaya Pravda Legal Code as well as in the wide-spread Church Slavonic law regulators that appeared in Rus after adoption of Christianity. The research results attest that the inheritance law terminology in treaties includes designation of inheritance, will and heirs. There is a special term chast ('part') that denotes a share of inheritance in the Russkaya Pravda and Church Slavonic legal texts. However, chast as a 'part' (share) is a characteristic of the Russkaya Pravda legal texts only. In Church Slavonic it is used in treaties for nominating the property in general. A similar lack of strict distribution between inheritance law terms zadnitsa and dom, presented in Old Russian texts, was noted in Church Slavonic treaties. Various derivatives of the root *rÌd- are used to denote the will in all texts under analysis; the terms pisati employed only in treaties and church law regulators to denote a written will or procedures of its preparation. The derivatives of the root *bliz- nominate the heirs in both text systems. A loan translation of the terminological word group malye / milye blizhnie / blizhiki dated to the year 911 is not viewed as a translators' experiment with the Greek terms, because it reflects a steady lexical distribution of adjectives malye / milye and the terms of relations in the Russian language. The results of the study testify some inheritance law terms correlation between Russia-Byzantium treaties, Russkaya Pravda and Church Slavonic legal texts, their translation in the treaties was not entirely artificial. The Church Slavonic and Old Russian terminological systems were open to these interferences in some ways.