Letters of Khan Ayuka and Their Russian Translations: Revisiting Religious Terms

Abstract

Introduction. Religious vocabulary is a means to express a special view of the world, a special value system. Goals. The work aims to identify some specific patterns in the functioning of religionyms in seventeenth-eighteenth century Kalmyk official letters and their Russian translations. Materials and methods. The article examines a total of seventy nine letters by the Kalmyk Khan Ayuka for the years 1685 to 1715 — and their parallel Russian translations. The original texts are housed by the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts and the National Archive of Kalmykia. Results. The analysis of religious vocabulary reveals certain differences in linguistic worldviews articulated by representatives of different religions. The texts contain religionyms associated with Buddhism (in Kalmyk letters), Orthodox Christianity (in Russian translations), and Islam (single mentions in Kalmyk letters and their Russian translations). In most cases, religionyms act as an important tool of diplomatic etiquette. Our comparison of the original texts and their translations made it possible to identify some semantic extensions pertaining to Kalmyk religion-related toponyms — names of places of pilgrimage, while there are almost no traces of Buddhist terms in Russian translations, which may be explained by differing religious ideas and concepts.

Keywords

• kalmyk official letters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
• russian translations
• religious terms
• buddhism
• orthodox christianity