A handwritten phrasebook Low German-Russian from the seventeenth century. That was the research object of PhD student Pepijn Hendriks. In the dissertation that he will defend on September 7, he questions the authenticity of the manuscript. Is it an original book or has it been copied, as was common in those days? And is the handwriting known as Tönnies Fonne's conversation book really named after its rightful author?
Tönnies Fonne's conversation book has been kept in the Royal Library in Copenhagen since 1785. It is a seventeenth-century phrase book for North German Hanseatic merchants. They traded with cities in northwestern Russia via the Baltic Sea.
The conversation book was to help the merchants to master the Russian language and customs. The book consists of long lists of words and countless sentences. A kind of 'What&How Russian' avant la lettre, according to researcher Pepijn Hendriks.
Russian off the street
The conversation book is not unique in its genre. It fits into a long European tradition of phrasebooks. What makes it so special is that it is one of the few sources of spoken Russian. The book is intended to allow German merchants to have simple conversations in Russian. Before that, the Russian of the street was recorded. In this case, Russian as spoken in the trading cities of Novgorod and Pskov. Many other Russian texts that have survived are in a general (not regionally colored) variant of Russian.
Incidentally, there is a collection of older sources from the same region:the Novgorod birch bark texts. Pieces of text written informally on birch bark that are also being researched at Leiden University. But for various reasons there are no more birch bark letters from after about 1450. Tönnies Fonne's conversation book is thus gratefully used as a source of information about Pskov's language at the beginning of the seventeenth century.
Copying tradition
It has been known for some time that conversation books were copied – that is, copied from each other. The fact that this manuscript also had a predecessor became clearer in the 1990s. Then another conversation book surfaced, Thomas Schroue's. Previous researchers have already pointed out a relationship between this conversation book and that of Tönnies Fonne. Hendriks compares the two works in detail in his dissertation. His analysis shows that 55 percent of the sentences in Tönnies Fonne's conversation book match those in Thomas Schroue. This means that both books have to go back to one common source.
Hendriks shows in his dissertation how important knowledge of the copying process is. This provides us with more information about the copyist. Was he sloppy, or was he very thorough?
Tönnies Fonne's handwriting is a clear improvement over Thomas Schroue's handwriting. For example, the copyist splits sentences that are too long in two and corrects incorrect cases.
According to Hendriks, this indicates that Tönnies Fonne did not blindly copy the original, unlike Thomas Schroue. There are several errors in his handwriting. This shows that Thomas Schroue has little or no command of Russian, while Tönnies Fonne is even familiar with regional variants of Russian. Dialect features that are too local are removed by him. Yet he also makes mistakes. Russian is not his native language for him either.
Wildlife
Not only this, but even more we learn about the copyist of Tönnies Fonne's conversation book. Hendriks comes with a surprising revelation. Although many researchers assumed that Tönnies Fonne was the author of the conversation book, Hendriks calls this "very unlikely". The image one has of Tönnies Fonne is that of a boy who arrived in Pskov at the age of 19. There he would have mastered Russian by writing a conversation book. But above all, he emerged from the archives as a tomboy. He was regularly involved in fights and even had to answer to a judge for his misconduct.
This image is not at all consistent with the image we have of the copyist of the manuscript. The corrections he made indicate a good command of Russian. In addition, the handwriting is decorated with drawings, rhymes and an instruction for the user. Hendriks argues that anyone who makes a conversation book for himself does not need such instructions. According to him, the conversation book was therefore not made by Tönnies Fonne. The writer was also not a merchant, but a German who lived in Pskov for a long time. He had made writing his profession and wrote the conversation book on behalf of Tönnies Fonne, after whom the book was named.
- What&How 17th century Russian (Newsletter Forum)
- B-mails from the Middle Ages (Knowledge link)