Turkisms in one of the early Russian translations of the 18th century

Abstract

The article considers Turkic borrowings in the Russian language at the beginning of the 18th century. The material of the study was a translation of the 17th century treatise “The History of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire” written by the English diplomat Paul Ricaut and translated into a number of European languages. The Russian translation was done by P. A. Tolstoy from the Italian version in 1702–1714 and published as “The Turkish Monarchy” in 1741. The study presents the methods of phonetic (orthographic) and morphological adaptation of Turkisms by comparing a typographical manuscript for typesetting with edits (made in 1725) and the printed text. The article aims at comparing the usage of borrowings with their forms in the Italian version of the treatise and in the Polish translation since the latter, apparently, was used in the process of typographical editing of the Russian text. A number of distorted forms of Turkisms that appeared in the Russian “Monarchy” as a result of the mechanical transfer of typos from the Italian translation were revealed. It has been established that the translation of compound nouns identified in the Turkic languages as izafet constructions was mainly a copying of their forms from the Italian translation. Most of the Turkisms in “The Turkish Monarchy” are exoticisms, but likely relevant for the Russian reader of the 18th century. Hence, the principles of including exoticisms in the “Dictionary of the Russian Language of the 18th Century” require clarification because a number of Turkisms denoting confessional concepts in modern Russian are part of active vocabulary.