Categories of the name and the verb in Anfangs-Gründe der Russischen Sprache (1731)

Abstract

The relevance of this study is due to the importance of Vasiliy Adodurov’s Anfangs-Gründe der Russischen Sprache as the first academic grammar of the Russian language written by a Russian scholar and published in Russia. The aim of the article is to show the innovations of Adodurov’s grammatical views and the relation of his grammar with Western European and Slavic grammatical traditions in the conceptual presentation of the name and the verb. The material of the research is the Russian grammar of Adodurov in comparison with the grammars by H. W. Ludolph, I. W. Paus, the Slavonic grammar by M. Smotritsky, the Latin grammars by I. Rhenius, E. Kopijewitz, I. Lange, “Grammatica Marchica”, and the German grammar by M. Schwanwitz. The descriptive and comparative research methods are used. A particularity of the research approach is the comparison of Anfangs-Gründe not only with the Russian, Slavonic and German grammars, but also with the Latin grammars. The results of the study show the innovations of Adodurov in the interpretation of the gender of names, voices of the Russian verb, and the forms of the future and the past tense. He simplifies the noun and verb description scheme taking into account specific features of the Russian language and methodological considerations. The article also proposes a new version of the collaboration between Adodurov and the anonymous German-speaking author of the comments in the margins of the manuscript Compendium Grammaticae Russicae, explaining Adodurov’s use of these comments in Anfangs-Gründe.