Latein als Medium für das Russisch-französische Wörterbuch von Antioch Kantemir

Abstract

The “century of the encyclopaedias and dictionaries” (Siècle de l’Encyclopédie) in France will have induced Antioch Kantemir (in 1738–1744 in Paris as Russian diplomat) to compile the first known “Russian-French dictionary”. As his main sources – Polikarpov (1704) and Weismann (1731) – provided Russian and Latin equivalents (as well as Greek or German vocabulary), but not the French words, a remarkable specific feature of the Kantemir-dictionary becomes apparent: for the French semantization process of Russian headwords often the Latin equivalent was used by means of consultation of Latin-French encyclopaedias or French dictionaries listing also the Latin words (even Lémery’s Latin-French specialised dictionary). Those dictionaries prove a Russian-Latin-French transfer, even though the step from Latin to French is not listed in Kantemir’s dictionary.