Skot4 upon learned people. From Shimkevich to Nazarenko [Скот4 по ученым людям: от Шимкевича до Назаренко]

This is a presentation of my conference talk given 09 June 2022 at the Vinogradov Institute of Russian language in Moscow. The conference was dedicated to the memory of Alexander V. Nazarenko (1948 – 2022).

I discuss an important observation made by Nazarenko (2012) about the special use of the Russian word skotъ, which assumes a borrowed meaning 'money, tax' owing to the influence Old Scandinavian word skattR. A similar observation has been made in a different context by the Russian linguist of the early XIX century, Fyodor S. Shimkevitsch (1802 – 1843). Both Shimkevitsch and Nazarenko developed a correct intuition concerning the relation of the Old Russian and Old Scandinavian words, since they read both Old Russian and Old Scandinavian texts and compared them directly. My own contribution to this tradition is the proof that the word  skotъ4 = 'money' has been borrowed into the Old Novgorod dialect of Russian but was generally avoided in bookish texts including the First Novgorod Chronicle since it was considered colloquial if not vulgar. A remarkable exception is the 1018 episode with Prince Jaroslav and posadnik Konstantin who collected tax (нача емати скотъ4) and hired a Varangian army. This episode has clear Novgorod roots. Скотъ4 is also documented in the earliest layers of "Russkaja Pravda", which originated as an oral text and was influenced by the Varangian oral law.

Comments. 

1. The title of the talk refers to the Old Russian collocation скотъ по людям '<to collect> tax upon people' attested in the 1018 AD episode from the First Novgorod Chronicle. Shimkevich and Nazarenko both contributed to the understanding of this episode and clarifying the meaning of the word skotъ in it. Since I collect opinions and interpretations of my prominent predecessors, I kinda collect tax from the learned people.
2. The index skotъ4 for the meaning 'money, tax' has been introduced in the Dictionary of the Russian Language of the XI - XVII century. I adopt it and prove formally that the Old Russian word skotъ was polysemous. 
3. This is a substantially revised version of the talk I gave in December 2021 at the Institute of Slavic Studies, see here: https://zenodo.org/records/14990682  . This version has a new preambulum with the discussion of Nazarenko's proposal (slides 3 to 15), a brief discussion of some issues related to the versions of 'Russkaja Pravda' (slides 22,  32, 45) and added references to the scholarly works by Nazarenko, Tolochko and Kuleshov. At the same time, this 2022 version drops the parts of the 2021 talk devoted to Indo-European etymologies.  
4. New finds of Novgorod birch bark letters (2022 - 2024) seem to support the view that the word skotъ4 was colloquial-to-vulgar in the medieval Novgorod.