Marine terms in unpublished mid-eighteenth-century works of admiral Semyon Mordvinov

The unpublished works of S. I. Mordvinov have not yet come to the attention of linguists and are a new source for studying the vocabulary of the Russian language of the XVIII century. Two essays by this author on maritime affairs have been preserved, written at intervals of a couple of decades - in the late 1730s and in 1764. The purpose of this study is to describe the changes that the terminological system of the sphere of ship tactics experienced in the usage of one author. According to our observations, the later work of 1764 is a revised version of the work of the 1730s. Each of the manuscripts stored in the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences has its own unique content - some paragraphs and sections, but the main sections coincide, including the headings, sometimes with variations. A comparison of the terminology of the two treatises shows that the specific terms of ship evolution (i.e., the position of ships in formation and its changes), in contrast to the more general marine terminology used by Mordvinov, are oriented towards the French usage. At the same time, in his later work, the gallicization of the terminological system intensifies - at both the morphological and phonetic levels. In this way, Mordvinov tries to standardize the terms in this area.