Bish’: Bayat’ or Byt’? About the Origin of One Particle

The article attempts to establish the origin of a Russian particle bish’. The debatable nature of this issue is due to the divergence of researchers' opinions about the generating basis: the data of etymological dictionaries refer to the development of this particle from the form of the 2nd person singular of the verb баять (баешь), while some studies indicate its origin from one of the preterites of the verb быти – the 3rd person plural aorist бѧше or the 3rd person singular imperfect. 

To achieve its goal, the article investigates the issues of the conditions for the occurrence of allegroforms and allegroforms in the aspect of phonetic patterns of the degree of stress of words. The paper compares etymological data and specifies the difference of verb forms of the past tense, in particular, within the framework of the destruction of past tenses system. The research material was the data of the National Corpus of the Russian language (pan-chronical corpus) and information from etymological and dialectological dictionaries.

As a result, a hypothesis was proposed about the formation of the particle under study from a special form that appeared due to mixing the uses of aorist and imperfect, which was already characteristic of the 14th century. The appearance of the particle dates back to the 17th century, as evidenced by the data of dictionaries.