Eastern realia in the seventeenth-century Central Asian acts of the Ambassadorial order

The article discusses the functioning of eastern realia in the texts of Russian cursive
official business records from seventeenth-century Central Asian acts of the Ambassadorial
Order — ancient Russian translations of petitions of Khiva and Bukhara ambassadors,
inscriptions on khan and ambassadorial gifts intended for Russian rulers and other
Russian officials, article lists of Russian envoys to Central Asia, formal replies from the
voevods (governors) of Russian cities, Ambassadorial books on the relations of Russia
with Khiva and Bukhara stored in funds No. 109 “Relations of Russia with Bukhara” and
No. 134 “Relations of Russia with Khiva” of the Central State Archive of Ancient Acts
in Moscow. Linguistic content of the indicated sources is described: based on this large
factual material, we show how eastern realia were adapted in ancient Russian translations
of petitions of Khiva and Bukhara ambassadors and inscriptions on khan and ambassadors’
gifts, written in the official Central Asian languages — seventeenth-century Turkic
and Persian, as well as ways of their penetration into the Russian lexis. A number of lexemes
described in the paper either are not recorded in historical dictionaries of the Russian
language or have later first dates of their occurrence; for some of the discussed realia,
we were able to establish new meanings or redefine existing ones more precisely.