Chapter A German Manuscript Grammar by Johann Werner Paus (1706)

Abstract

Petrine epoch is often seen as both rapidly adopting Western values and revolutionary regarding the antecedent Russian cultural tradition, although still strongly depending upon it. Manuductio ad linguam Germanicam, written in 1706 by J. W. Paus and preserved at the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences, is an example of this, as it combines Church Slavonic terminology and basic definitions with European conceptual models, a feature that became characteristic of many early eighteenth-century bilingual manuals. Manuductio ad linguam Germanicam are draft notes, concerning how to compile a foreign language manual for Russian students in their native tongue. The text has attracted some scholarly attention; however, until now, no one has analyzed its linguistic conception and terminology. Paus’s ideas were pioneering. The text allows us to reconstruct how German was taught at the Moscow gymnasium: the mentor spoke Russian, often resorting to Latin terminology and occasionally – to German definitions. Paus borrowed the basic structure of his manual from Smotrytsky, while some of his comments indicate an orientation on seventeenth-century German “universal” grammars such as those by Ch. Helvig and J. Bödiker.