“Diatriba de Europaeorum linguis” by Joseph Justus Scaliger and the Church Slavonic Translation of the 17th century

Abstract

The article contains a linguistic analysis of the Church Slavonic translation of a short fragment of one of the chapters from the Latin-language geographical atlas compiled by the Dutch cartographers Willem and Joan Blaeu in the first half of the 17th century. The fragment we’re interested in is the Diatriba de Europaeorum linguis (Diatribe on the Languages of the Europeans) by Joseph Justus Scaliger, written in 1599 and published in 1610. Joan and Willem Blaeu include the complete text in their chapter on Europe. The translation of the first part of the Atlas, which contained this chapter, was carried out by Epiphanius Slavinetsky in 1650s in Moscow, and is preserved in the author’s draft, as well as in the clean copy made by a Moscow scribe, both of which are located today in the State Historical Museum manuscript collection. The language of this translation provides a vivid example of the “scholarly” register of Church Slavonic, which was developing at the time, indeed, amongst Slavinetsky’s circle of companions. The article is mainly concerned with the lexical structure of the translation; creation of new words, expanding meanings of lexemes and use of rare Church Slavonic words are characteristic for the Atlas’ translation as a whole, and they have been found in the analysed fragment in particular. We are also inspecting some graphical and orthographic specifics of the translation, mainly the ways of interpreting personal names, which are fairly frequent in a geographical text. The article includes the full text of Scaliger’s Diatribe according to the 1645 edition of the Blaeu’s Atlas, with marked differences from the original edition of 1610, as well as Slavinetsky’s Church Slavonic translation according to the manuscript kept in the State Historical Museum (Moscow).