Pravoslávna misionárska lingvistika v Ruskom impériu (špecifiká a problémy žánru)
Orthodox Missionary Linguistics in the Russian Empire (Specifics and Problems of the Genre)

Summary/Abstract: The article examines the phenomenon of missionary linguistics in the Russian Empire, shaped significantly by Russian state and church policies. Beginning in the late 18th century, three main genres of missionary linguistic literature were published: grammars, dictionaries, and primers. The research encompasses material from 32 languages within the Uralic, Altaic, Chukchi-Kamchatkan, Eskimo-Aleut, and Na-Dene language families, as well as isolated languages. Missionaries most frequently created primers to teach indigenous people to read and write in their native languages, aiming for their adoption of Russian. This led missionaries to develop new alphabets based on the Russian civil script. The article addresses the problems of classifying missionary linguistic works and examines the popular linguistic theories used by Russian missionaries, particularly language affinity and the comparative method. It also explores the role of Russian missionaries, who were lay philologists and often children of Orthodox priests. The article identifies missionary grammars of 17 languages and examines the reasons for their creation, as well as the methods used to describe one language in terms of another. It concludes by discussing the difficulties in classifying this extensive missionary linguistic material.

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