Articles

Language Developments of Legal Documents of the Crimean Khanate and Muscovite Russia during the Sixteenth–Seventeenth centuries

Vostok/Oriens '2015, №4

 
The article analyses the structure and stylistic features of court records detecting common language elements. The author makes use of the Russian legal documents and the documents from the court register of the Crimean Bahchisaray kadilik. These documents belong to entirely different logical structures of law systems. They are written in different languages and traditions, and their sources of content terminology are different too. Stylistically, the Crimean and Russian legal documents share the only feature that is neutralization of expressiveness in speech. Despite the long history of coexistence of two linguistic cultures, Turkish and Russian, the legal sphere was almost free of foreign language borrowings in Russian language of Turkic origin. Rare borrowings which had taken place in the era of the Golden Horde were not legal industry terms or some conceptual clusters in the justice system of Muscovite Russia.

Keywords: sidzhil, court registries, Bahchisaray kadilik, waquf, the source of law, the language of legal documents, borrowing

Pages: С. 168–175