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11 - The Role of French in the Formation of Professional Architectural Terminology in Eighteenth-Century Russia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 October 2017

Sergei Klimenko
Affiliation:
Faculty of Reconstruction and Restoration of the Moscow Institute of Architecture
Iuliia Klimenko
Affiliation:
architect and architectural historian and a member of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS)
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Summary

It is only quite recently that specialists have begun to investigate architectural terminology, its place in the Russian language and the origin of various concepts and expressions. Historians of architecture and art historians as well as linguists and philologists have addressed the subject. Borrowings from French architectural terminology have been predominant in Russian since the early eighteenth century, but no special study of them has yet been undertaken. When a dictionary of eighteenth century Russian was being prepared back in the 1960s, the authors of the proposed volume stressed that it should include material from a ‘diverse range of business documents, scientific works and technical manuals’ (Sorokin 1965: 5–42). Likewise for the study of architectural terminology, we need a broad survey of publications, documents about architecture and construction, various types of manuscript and other eighteenth-century sources. No fewer than five architectural dictionaries have been published in Russia since the 1990s (Iusupov 1994; Partina 1994; Pluzhnikov 1995/ 2012; Batorevich and Kozhitseva 1999/ 2001; Vlasov 2003). However, the majority of them have ignored the etymology of the words they contain, even though in France, for example, the first etymological dictionary of architectural terms was published as long ago as 1753 (Gastelier de la Tour 1753).

This chapter aims to go some way towards rectifying this gap in scholarship by examining translation and publication of books on architecture in Russian, the influence of French publications on Russian architectural terminology, the role of foreign architects in spreading French terminology and French influence on Russian urbanistics terminology. First, though, we shall give a brief overview of the origins of the French architectural terms themselves.

The sources of the architectural terminology which came into being over the period from the seventeenth century to the twentieth date from classical antiquity and the Renaissance. France turned its gaze on the architectural heritage of ancient Rome and the Italian Renaissance at an earlier date than other European countries, as far back as the sixteenth century and especially in the seventeenth.

Type
Chapter
Information
French and Russian in Imperial Russia
Language Use among the Russian Elite
, pp. 209 - 227
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2015

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