Russo-Persian language contacts of the Safavid era: Russian loanwords in the petitions of kupchina Khwajah Rahmat

The purpose of this article is the study of Russian loanwords in the language of the Persian merchants who conducted trade in Russia in the XVII century. Persian loanwords in the Russian language of that era are well-documented and thoroughly studied, whereas Russian borrowings in Persian have not been studied to the same extent, which can be partly explained by the sparsity and insufficient exploration of the archival documents pertaining to the period. The immediate objective that the authors of this research have set is the analysis of the vocabulary of the Persian petitions from the envoy of the Safavid Shah Safi I, Khwajah Rahmat, and his record keeper ‘Abd al-Vali, written in 1630-1631 and addressed to Tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich. The petitions are stored in the Fond 77 «Russia’s Relations with Persia» of the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts. Such documents have never been used for studying the Russian-Persian linguistic contacts, which stipulates the urgency of the research. It has demonstrated that the chosen material enables widening our apprehension of the penetration of Russian lexical units into Persian, and demonstrates that the process of lexical borrowing was mutual for both languages. The terms borrowed mainly pertain to the sphere of trade, which in the XVI and the XVII centuries was the frontline of the Russian-Persian cultural exchange. The analysis of the loanwords is preceded by a brief overview of commercial and diplomatic ties between Tsardom of Muscovy and the Safavid Empire, as well as the historiography of Russian and Persian loanword studies.