On Some Problematic Terms Presented in the Process of Edition of the Priest’s Euchologion

Abstract

With the help of praying and blessing from Reverend Ioane Gam-rekeli, Metropolitan of Kutaisi and Gaenati, the new edition of the priest’s Euchologion is being prepared for editing. There has been a need for this work to be done for a considerable amount of timefor Georgian Church as nowadays, in the existing Euchologion texts, we can notice quite a number of inaccuracies (of phonological, morphological, syn-tactic, lexical-phraseological, orthographic and punctuation character). Besides the above -mentioned, the structure of euchologions is quite inconvenient (which resulted from the economic need for using paper, time or other resources). The mentioned factors make the process of prayer quite difficult for the priests. As a result of the above said, a group has been created in which church persons and linguists are participating.

It is clear that Euchologions are used in several situations and for many purposes. However, in the present paper, we try to speak about one very interesting term which seems to us one of the most interesting among the others, in relation to the terms denoting the titles of the religious servants. Those terms can be met in texts as kananarhi or kanonarqi. Surely, none of the variations of the terms are of Georgian origin. That is why we decided to determine which of the mentioned words could be better in the meaning of more precise and adoptable borrowing. We noticed that in the modern texts, the form kanonarqi is privileged and we do not think this choice is right. The texts of the journal “Karibche” show that only mentioned form is used in its texts. It also prevails in the names of the saints (Worthy Father Leonti Mghvimeli, canon arch….).

To eliminate such diversity and to base the right form for the titles, it has become necessary to investigate the history of the origin of some terms. We searched for the mentioned terms in the Corpus of Georgian Language and a number of dictionaries. We should note that to be clear about the mentioned opinion, we addressed it to the Department of scientific terminology, Arn. Chikobava Institute of Linguistics. We will try to represent the results of our minor investiga-tion and our opinion about several variations of one term.

In our paper, we present the principles and the problems of our work and underline the importance of work to have clear and correct terminology in general and, specifically, in our case. It should also be noted that the editorial work on the new edition of the Euchologion which is now going on, has important practical significance and in our opinion, it will be important for the Georgian Church, in general. We hope that our paper will make a modest contribution to scientific research for Georgian Church terminology in the sense of reaching more terminological clarity even only for one term.