The focus of this presentation is on a problematic expression of the “Flood Prayer” (Germ. Sintflutgebet) contained in the Martin Luther’s “Small Catechism”, often known in the literature simply as the Enchiridion. Methodologically based on the “hermeneutic method” it has been brought to light a notable difference between the early Baltic traditions in the rendering of the German collective numeral composite selbacht.
The German numeral category, not attested in the modern Baltic languages, has left some traces in the earliest Old Prussian and Old Lithuanian catechisms. A different rendering has been investigated in the Old Latvian Luteran Catechism Corpus for the 16th and 17th centuries, and even later. The comparison of the corresponding attestations of the devotional text of the “Flood Prayer” in the earliest Old Baltic Lutheran Catechisms reveals a complex situation in the three Baltic languages and shows a sort of “guest in the system” of the numerals.
Translators working in the three Baltic languages faced challenges in dealing with this grammatical category but ultimately resolved them according to two translation strategies: explanatory rendering and imitational rendering. The in-depth corpus-based study of the “Flood Prayer” undertaken has revealed how a grammatical category foreign to the Baltic languages was variously interpreted over time in the Lithuanian and Latvian traditions.
The investigated passage offers interesting insights especially for the (Old) Latvian tradition such as the emerging of an articloidal construction. Moreover, both Lithuanian and Latvian show as well an increasingly presence of definitness. For (Old) Latvian I consider a second-degree definitness accompanied by a parallel reinforcement of the lexical material, the expression of which may be observed diachronically.