Le lexique relatif à la navigation en vieux slave et vieux russe

Abstract

The Vocabulary Related to the Navigation in Old Church Slavonic and Old Russian This article is the result of a research on the vocabulary related to the navigation in Old Church Slavonic and Old Russian, and concretely on the semantic subdomains «boats», «parts of boats» and «crew of boats». With this aim, we analyzed several religious and historiographical works of both Southern and Eastem Slavic origin: the four ‘canonicaľ OCS Gospel manuscripts (Zographensis, Marianus, Assemanianus and Savvina kniga), the Codex Suprasliensis, the Apostolos Strumički, the Povest´ vremennyx let, the Old Russian translations of the Byzantine chronicle of Georges the Monk and of the Christian Topography of Cosmas Indicopleustes, as well as the three main editions of the Russian Bible (Gennadian, Ostrog and Synodal). First of all, we observed that in the translations from Greek the words корабль ‘ship’ and лодьѣ ‘boat, small boať are used in a generic sensé, while in the original Russian chronicles their meaning is more specific. Secondly, we found a majority of loanwords from Greek, besides some loanwords of Scandinavian and Baltic origin in Old Russian. And finally, we showed how the study of the vocabulary of shipping in Old Church Slavonic and Old Russian, together with the evidence of the historical sources, would allow us to reconstruct the whole evolution of shipbuilding among the Eastern Slavs.