Translated Diplomatic Letters of Chinese Emperor to Russian Tsar of late 17th Century as Linguistic Source

Abstract

The study introduces into scientific usage and for the first time analyses from the perspective of a linguistic source study several translations of diplomatic letters of the Chinese Emperor to the Russian Tsar of the late 17th century, written in Cyrillic cursive and translated from Chinese into Latin and then from Latin into Russian language. The aim of the study is the consideration of their genre and stylistic specifics and defining linguistic characteristics. This seems relevant, because it allows to add to and refine scientific knowledge regarding the development of the Russian national language on the periphery of the Muscovite state. Analysis of the language of the monuments evidence of a consistency in deliberate archaization by the use of Church Slavic words and forms by scribes, which probably was a token of diplomatic documents. Meanwhile, the texts reflect both life forms and pronunciation variants of spoken Russian usage of the time, which may indicate that the interpreter dictated the text to the scribe, translating orally from Latin. The study shows that the translated Latin documents are interesting linguistic source from the point of view of linguistic phenomena reflected there - phonetic and morphological systems, the vocabulary of the period of formation of language of the Russian nation.

Keywords

• written monument
• language of translated literature
• cursive writing
• variants of grammatical forms
• genres of writ proceedings