DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15513944
title: A воз и ныне-ка там. К истории частицы КА в русском языке [And the things are still the same. On the evolution of the particle KA in Russian]

description: In this talk, given at the 2025 Memorial Zaliznjak's Readings, I discuss the evolution of the particle KA in Russian.  This enclitic particle expresses the meaning of soft encouragement in standard Modern Russian and attaches to imperative forms or ininitial proclitics like NU that can are semantically equivalent to imperatives. A close semantic parallel is provided by the Danish imperative particle LIGE that conveys a similar meaning. However, in the Russian dialects and in the Russian language of the XIX century, the particle KA is also used as a proximal deictic marker 'here and now' or 'towards the speaker' and attaches to other clitic hosts, e. g. personal pronouns (MNE-KA), wh-words (GDE-KA), etc. Max Vasmer in his Etymological Dictionary (vol. 1, 1964) takes for granted that the deictic KA (which has Slavic parallels) and imperative KA represent the same element. However, Vladimir Orel (2007) in his Etymological Dictionary accepts Igor S. Vahros's hypothesis (1984) that the imperative KA is a recent Russian innovation rooted in rapid colloquial speech and based on the allegro-variant of some focus particle going back to Proto-Slavic *toliko. He claims furthermore that the initial form is neither -KA, nor -KO, but -TKO ( < TOKO < TOL'KO < TOLIKO) and assumes that the imperative -KA /-KO /-TKO was absent from Old Russian. This theory, attractive as it is, must be rejected ipso facto since the imperative KA is safely documented by the Old Novgorod Birch bark letters № 109 and 854 dating with XII century, while deictic KA is attested in the same epoch by the Birch Bark letter 652. Moreover, the Birch bark letter № 1002 (XII century) already contains the compound deictic particle KO-VO, known from Northern Russian dialects. Andrej A. Zaliznjak (1993, 2004, 2008) correctly classified Old Russian KA as a 2P particle conforming to Wackernagel's law, though he stated that the data is too scanty to predict the place of KA in Old Russian clitic clusters.  Regarding the Birch bark letter № 109, where KA attaches to the clause-initial adverbial NYNĔ, Zaliznjak initially (1989) assumed that NYNĔKA is a single lexical element characteristic of South-West Russia, though in 1993 he converted to the syntactic analysis with Wackernagel's law. Zaliznjak's first hypothesis was later supported by Polekhov & Krysko (2021) and Gippius et. al. (2023) provided that the author of the Birch bark letter № 109, certain Zhiznomir, indeed had clear Old South Russian features in his idiolect. However, the probable South Russian origin of Zhiznomir does not undermine the syntactic analysis of  NYNĔ=KA since the context is unequivocally imperative. 

Comments. 



 The Acknowledgments, incl. the gratitudes to the conference participants are on slide 29 of the revised presentation. All disclaimers follow.

 On the reasons of space, I don't discuss the important contribution of Pertsov (1996) claiming a morphological approach to the imperative KA in Modern Russian. This paper is listed in the References. Neither do I discuss Levontina's claim (2019) that the particle KA tends to expand its syntactics in Modern Russian. This paper is listed in the References, too. The checking of these claims requires an analysis of corpus data, which is beyond the reach of this paper.

Andrej A. Zaliznjak's views of the Old Russian particle KA and its occurrences in the epigraphic documents have changed substantially in the period from 1989 to 1995 ― a detail which might be of interest for his biographers. In 1989, see [НГБ VIII] in the References, he clined towards a morphological analysis of NYNĔKA in the Birch bark letter № 109 (early XII century) but mentioned the cryptic spelling [T]OUTE KA <wrote X> 'X wrote right here' in the graffito [Медынцева 1978: 154, № 212]. If he assumed a syntactic approach in 1989, he should treat  NYNĔ=KA 'right now' on a par with TOUTE=KA 'right here'. In 1993, see [НГБ IX: 285 ] in the References, he already mentions that Birk barch letters 109 and 682 contain the enclitic particle KA but do not mention [Медынцева 1978, № 212]. In the first edition of "Old Novgorod Dialect" (1995), Zaliznjak does not treat -KA in NYNĔKA from the Birch bark letter № 109 as a suffix but do not comment its status as a clitic either. This gap is filled in the 2nd edition of "Old Novgorod Dialect" (2004: 259), where  NYNĔKA from № 109 is explicitly analyzed as NYNĔ=KA, i. e. as a clitic host NYNĔ + enclitic =KA. The same syntactic interpretation is taken in the book [Zaliznjak 2008]. Finally, in 2018, Savva M. Mikheev (see the 'Related Works' section) showed the reading [T]OUTE KA <wrote X> 'X wrote right here' in the graffito [Медынцева 1978, № 212] is a phantom. Therefore, this Novgorod graffito must be excluded from the list of Old Russian documents containing the particle =KA. 

 In the latest updated version (25.05.25), I fixed the bug with the name of Igor Vahros's paper (1984. The correct title is 'Происхождение приимперативной частицы - ка в русском языке' in the file and in the 'References' section on this website. I also corrected the mistake with misclassifying the example from Nikolai Leskov on slide 12.