The Old English Prayer The Lord’s Prayer as a Semantic Way of Conveying Christian Morals

Abstract

The paper highlights the integral traditional formula of the prayer Pater noster that has reached our days because of the New Testament, whereas its earlier variations remained at the level of literary monuments. In the article the prayer to the Lord, which came to our days as part of a poetic collection of the 10th century The Exeter Book, is presented. This prayer is an extension of the New Testament prayer through additional appeals to the Lord, as well as additional lexemes that are not found in the Biblical version. The author notes that at the dawn of the Christianity of the Anglo-Saxon world, there were many accepted versions of the naming of Jesus Christ, literally fixed lexemes of the Old English language, reflecting the name of the Son of God. The current article deals with the prayer's discourse in the light of primary and secondary codes. The text of the prayer Pater noster is given in Latin and Old English. The Latin text is presented as the primary code in the sense what the sentence means, the Old English text is added to the Latin text and tells what the speaker of the prayer means. The primary code is the sentence content and the secondary code is the speaker means.