Ivan Petlin's report about his trip to China as a linguistic source

The end of the 16th - 17th centuries is a period of active commercial and diplomatic contact development of Russia with Asian countries including China. In 1618 a small cossack detachment headed by Ivan Petlin was sent there from Tomsk. His trip account was the first reliable document about the Russians' visit to China, it enriched the world science with geographical and ethnographic data about that country. Already in the 17th c. it was translated into some European languages and included into G. Milton's "The Treatise about Moscowia". In 1969 the full set of documents concerning that mission was published in the collection Russian-Chinese Relations for the first time. Three versions of the report and "skazka" ("tale") of civil people contain the main information about the trip. It is a narration about the detachment's way from Tomsk to Great China (Beijing), a description of the Russian mission stay in the capital. The businesslike laconism of the document is combined with the lively natural speech of a Siberian cossack in the text, which makes it an informative source for different aspects of linguistic investigations. One of the most perspective subjects with this material is the perception of a foreign culture by a Russian. These texts have both detailed descriptions of foreign things, direct indications about the impossibility to name them in Russian ("I don't know their names"), expression of the general emotional impression ("astonishing wonder", "it is frightening"). A widespread way of nomination is comparison ("like we have", "in the Russian way"), sometimes there is a translation ("it is 'ruble' in Russian and 'liang' in Chinese"). The report vocabulary is interesting, it adds a number of lexical units to The Russian Dictionary of ll-17th cc., for example, idolopoklonstvo ('idolatry'), irdeni (a precious stone) etc., elaborates on the meaning and time of existing of some words. Military, administrative, nature, everyday words are represented most completely. The variants of the report texts allow to study the synonymy of the expressive methods of the 17th c. Russian: chudo - divo ('miracle - wonder'), tsar' - khan ('czar - khan'), mnogo - net chisla (a lot - endless), etc. Our manuscripts demonstrate the variation of the language of the time in the declinations of nouns and pronouns, the interaction of the types of singular noun declinations and the unification of declinations in the plural. The transitional condition of the Russian syntax system is illustrated by compound sentences in which condition and consecutive relations are expressed by the combination of coordinative conjunctions with the subordinative ones: a . . . ino, i. . . ino, da . . . ino.

Keywords

Authors

References