“Rospis’ Kitayskomu gosudarstvu i Lobinskomu...” by the Tomsk Cossack Ivan Petlin: External criticism of the source, linguistic publication

Abstract

The article presents the text of the report on the trip to China of a small squad of Russian service people under the command of the Tomsk Cossack Ivan Petlin in 1618-1619. The text is prepared according to the rules of a linguistic publication. Written in the genre of rospis’ (list, inventory), this document became the first reliable evidence of a Russian visit to China and enriched world science with its geographical and ethno-cultural data. The research part of the publication contains the external criticism of the source, including the definition of authorship, time and place of origin of the source, the conditions for its formation and the genre features of the presented Rospis’. According to the established tradition, a complex of paleographic data of the text was considered within the framework of external criticism of Petlin’s report; this relates to its linguistic informativeness: the type of writing, spelling features and the presence of edits in the text, the readability of the text, as well as the characteristics of the graphics of the records created by two people. The text of the present Rospis’ is completed in cursive writing, typical for the beginning of the 17th century, with an even direction of the lines that contain traces of gridding, which gives the writing a certain accuracy. Repeated introductions (a ot - whom?/what? -ekhati/idti - how long?) and parallelism in the construction of sentences are noted on some sheets, which characterises business letters of this era. The analysis revealed new information that supplements the linguistic richness of the previous editions of this report by historians and made it possible to clarify some lexemes (so vstuku, Yunokach’), a number of morphological forms (yadra) reflecting the construction of nominal and pronominal paradigms at that time (vo khramu, vsyakimi obrazy, za plechmi); numerals which in this publication are represented in numbers (vosm’, po pyatidesyat) proved to be particularly informative. When reproducing the text, the rules of a linguistic publication were taken into account, involving the separation of words, the introduction of capital letters for proper names, marking the end of the line and sheet. Marginal graphemes are in italics, titles are omitted, and abbreviations are not opened due to their traditional character for medieval writing (tsr’, gdrstvo). Lost letters at the end of a line or omitted at the end of a word before a similar grapheme at the beginning of the next one are restored in square brackets, reading options are offered in parentheses. The only punctuation marks given are dots next to letter-numbers indicated in the record (da v to zh ozero .D reki / vpali), the selection of paragraphs corresponds to spaces at the end of lines. The text is reproduced letter for letter, reflecting the functional duplication of different graphic characters where possible. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.