Religious vocabulary in missionary linguistic materials for the indigenous peoples of Russian empire before 1917.

Abstract

Christian missionaries in the territory of the Russian Empire in the process of their evangelisation also worked as authors of grammars, dictionaries and alphabets of the languages of the indigenous peoples of various language families mostly in 19th century. The question is how the missionaries dealt with the translation of the Christian religious lexicon in their native languages.

We have analysed the grammars and dictionaries of the Kalmyk, Tatar, Udmurt, Chuvash, Mari, Komi and other languages. As a result, we have established and show in the report that missionary editions of language manuals were accompanied by Christian texts as examples, but also, naturally, by texts of written or oral popular culture and even fragments from texts of Russian literature (I.A.

Krylov, A.S. Pushkin).