G. F. Müller’s Dictionaries as a Source for Insights into Tatar Dialect History: A LingvoDoc-Based Analysis

Introduction. The article examines a total of three G. F. Müller’s dictionaries of languages spoken by peoples inhabiting the Volga Region, the Urals, and created in the mid-to-late eighteenth century. As a member to the Great Northern Expedition, G. F. Müller arrived in Kazan Governorate (1733) to explore languages, habits and household life of the Volga peoples. Goals. The article employs tools of the LingvoDoc platform (https://lingvodoc.ispras.ru) to analyze grapho-phonetic features of the Tatar language contained in the dictionaries. Materials and methods. The work is first to introduce handwritten dictionaries of G. F. Müller included in Collection 1125 (Müller’s Portfolio 199) at the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts (RGADA). Müller’s dictionaries that comprise language materials collected from native speakers have been uploaded onto the LingvoDoc platform, namely: two units compiled from archival dictionaries (Files 513 g1 and 513 g2), and one dictionary from a published book (1791). Those are processed with the aid of LingvoDoc tools to yield a graph of proximity degrees between the dictionaries — and modern standard Tatar, its dialects. The comparative and historical comparative methods prove most instrumental herein. Results. The grapho-orthographic analysis into Tatar-language materials of the dictionaries reveals as follows: 1) all processes of the Tatar consonant shift were completed in the eighteenth century; 2) meanwhile, the Volga vowel shift had not yet been completed, and for [*o] and [*u] the process had not even started; 3) in the eighteenth century, Tatar dialect zones were shaped already; 4) the 1791 Cyrillic dictionary differs from modern standard Tatar and dictionaries in Latin characters by some innovative elements; 5) the latter dictionaries are closer to modern standard Tatar. The corpora and concordances of G. F. Müller’s dictionaries hosted by the LingvoDoc platform make it possible to investigate languages of the Volga Region and verify obtained conclusions using broader materials.

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