Lexical innovations of Moses Gumilyevsky in his Areopagitica translation of the 18^th century

Abstract

The article analyzes some lexical units (nouns) from the first Russian translation of Areopagitica, made in the 18 th century by hieromonk Moses Gumilyovsky, which is of great interest from the point of view of the Russian literary language history of that period. These units are not recorded in lexicographic sources, but most of them are formed according to regular word-formation models of the Russian language. Some of them are structural calques or semi-calques of Greek equivalents. It is noteworthy that even when making a calque, Gumilyevsky tended to create a semantic translation. The purpose of the work is the lexical and word-formation analysis of such word usage. To achieve it, we classified the studied units in accordance with their representations in historical lexicographic sources. As a result of the fulfilled research, we have found that Gumilyevsky's new words are primarily nomina abstracta with the meaning of quality, less often of action (or its result) in accordance with the textual and genre affiliation of the treatise translated by him and its content features. Even within the framework of a small volume of the analyzed vocabulary, we have traced the main trends of Gumilyevsk’s translation as a whole: the translation of substantiates by suffix formations, the preference for names with the meaning of abstract quality and the semantically oriented transmission of the original text.