West Russian sources of document names in the Russian chancery language of the Petrine era

The article examines the titles of documents of West Russian origin that enriched the genre nomenclature in the era of Peter the Great's reforms. The administrative reforms of Peter the Great affected not only the system and principles of state governance but also the chancery language that facilitated it. The chancery language of the Petrine era incorporated new lexical and grammatical elements, altered document design principles, and, among other things, was enriched with new document genres. In academic literature, new document titles are typically viewed either as borrowings from European languages (including via Polish mediation) or as terms coined within the Russian chancery Language based on Church Slavonic models. However, the analysis of several document titles presented in this article shows that this perspective on their origin is oversimplified. The studied document titles were divided into two groups: those formed on Slavic models (donesenie, donoshenie, prnshenie) and those of European origin (artikul, dokument, instruktsiya, kvitantsiya, relyatsiya). By comparing historical dictionaries and extensive textual data - including documents from pre-Petrine Rus', Western Rus' of the 15th-17th centuries, the Petrine era, as well as Polish documents - it is concluded that these document titles were present in the documentary practice of Western Rus' long before Peter the Great's reforms, having entered it from Polish. Thus, the analysis leads to the conclusion that Peter the Great's reforms adopted administrative experience not only from Western Europe but also from its closest neighbors - Western Rus', including its chancery language. Apparently, the linguistic habits of the emperor's associates, many of whom were of West Russian origin, played a significant role in the infiltration of Western Russianisms into the chancery language of the Petrine era.

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