ИСТИНА

The talk is about semantic features of two Old Russian verbs which were synonyms with very similar meanings. The study is based primarily on the Old Russian subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus (www.ruscorpora.ru); in addition, I consider tagged texts from the collection of Old Russian manuscripts (http://www.lrc-lib.ru/), historical dictionaries and also a number of offline sources. In Modern Russian both dumati and gadati denote mental processes (ʻthinkʼ and ʻtry to guessʼ respectively); in Old Russian they were close to speech act verbs. In most cases both dumati and gadati meant ʻto discuss a problem with somebodyʼ / ʻto exchange ideas, trying to resolve a problemʼ. So the verbs are often used in constructions with the preposition съ (ʻwithʼ) to indicate discussants; with the preposition о (ʻaboutʼ) / with indirect question to indicate the theme / the content of the discussion and with the preposition на (ʻagainstʼ) to indicate a person whom discussants want to fight with. Compare: Рюрикъ же поча дѹмати с мѹжи своими како бы ємѹ дати во(ло)сть всеволодоу (Kiev Chronicle, 236a: 20) – ʻRyurik began to discuss with his men how he could give the land to Vsevolodʼ; А гадаите на нь бра(т)е како на нь поити (Kiev Chronicle, 135а: 25) – ʻLet's deliberate, brothers, how to fight against himʼ. In some contexts dumati, being used with the dative case of the addressee, could even denote a speech act in the proper sense of the word, meaning ʻtellʼ; e.g. Они же начаша доумати емоу не ѣзди по ни(х) (Kiev Chronicle,139б:1) – ʻThey told him: “O prince, don't ride behind them”. Gadati could also denote a speech act or at least something very close to it, but it was not the same speech act as dumati denoted: it could mean ʻread and tell fortuneʼ; e.g. инѣмъ вѣдуща и гадающа а свое пагубы не вѣдуща (Povest' Vremennykh Let, Laurentian Chronicle, 66b: 4) – ʻ… Telling fortune for others but being unable to tell fortune for themselvesʼ. It's important that in contrast to dumati, gadati could be used (but in very rare occasions!) as a mental verb meaning ʻbelieveʼ (and it's the same function as modern dumat' has), e.g. но нѣ(с) ми извѣсто тако коже азъ гадаю елико ми бдеть извѣсто ѿ тво(и)хъ ст҃ыхъ словесъ (Life of Andrey the Holy Fool) – ʻBut I don't know anything as well, as, I believe, I shall know from your saint wordsʼ. So dumati and gadati significantly differ from each other in some contexts, but they also have a large neutralization zone. It's interesting that they could be used next to each other within the same phrase, e.g. А ты брате <...> старѣи еси насъ а доумаи гадаи о русскои земли (Kiev Chronicle, 236г: 28) – ʻYou brother <...> are older than us, deliberate then (with us) about Russian landʼ.