O wariantywności zapisów nazw własnych w "Kronice Wielkopolskiej"

Abstract

The oldest Polish annals that are known under the name of the Chronicle o f Great Poland have been preserved in nine manuscripts, which prove to be insufficient for a reconstruction of the cvunknown original, each of them being a late made copy of an ungenuine version. The philologists should pay the utmost attention to the proper names with which the Chronicle is generously studded, and which often appear variform in the respective manuscripts. The secondary variants resulted mostly from the clerical errors made by many successive generations of copyists. In order to find the primitive form of a name, it is sometimes necessary to inquire into various psychic mechanisms that are usually conducive to errors in the process of copying whenever an ancient text proves difficult to make out. In this paper, the author has distinguished several characteristic causes of the clerical errors found in the Chronicle. He argues that some kinds of those errors can lead to important conclusions concerning not only the time and place where the text was copied, but also some other circumstances. Thus he notices that errors committed by medieval copyists are sometimes of historical value as a kind of testimony. Besides, he insists that the adequate filiation of the Chronicle manuscripts cannot be duly proposed until the mutual relationship of all the respective variants of the proper names have been conclusively indicated. Some forms of certain proper names occurring in the Chronicle deserve special attention because of their being more archaic than the forms known from other ancient sources.