And after negotiations… the parties agreed (The Treaty of Nystadt: Features of the text and language)

The Treaty of Nystadt, which ended the many years of bloody Northern War, has not yet received a comprehensive linguistic description. Concluded in German, the Treaty was soon translated into Russian and Swedish and published in the fall of 1721 in Russia and Sweden. The article describes and analyzes the morphological, lexical and syntactic features of the Russian text of the Treaty of Nystadt. The morphological features of the Treaty are analyzed in comparison with the texts of Peter's decrees of the same time. It is concluded that the morphological design of the Russian text more or less corresponds to the business text of the Peter the Great era: it lacks book preterites and represents the morphological variation and instability of nominal forms. At the same time, the text almost does not contain those morphological forms that were associated with the old chancery language. The lexical basis of the text is a fusion of Russian words, Slavonicisms and borrowings-Europeanisms. A comparison of the vocabulary of the Russian translation and the original German text revealed a clear desire of Russian translators to literally translate the original German text into Russian, which manifested itself in numerous borrowings from the German language. The need to bring the content of the text to the general reader forced the publishers of the Russian text to introduce numerous glosses into it (more than 60). However, many borrowed words are not accompanied by glosses in the text of the treaty; this fact indicates their assimilation into the Russian language by the time the treaty was concluded. The impact of the syntax of the original German text on Russian one is manifested in the peculiarities of word order, which is more or less accurately reproduced in the Russian translation, and in the peculiarities of the use of auxiliary and modal vocabulary, as well as various modal intensifiers. Experiencing a strong influence of the original German text, nevertheless, when translating modal constructions, translators in some cases use Polonisms (pozvolyat', dopuskat', imet' + infinitive), which were included in the Russian business language of the first quarter of the 18th century. When selecting speech means, translators sought to preserve the colloquial speech basis of the text, clearing it of outdated bureaucratic (chancery) elements and introducing into it some "weak" signs of bookishness (morphological Slavonicisms such as endings -ago, -yya, Slavonicisms in the field of auxiliary vocabulary). These elements of bookishness reflected the authorities' intention to increase the status of the document in society, and at the same time pointed to the importance of the content of the Treaty of Nystad. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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