Les noms propres dans le Journal de voyage de Nikita Demidoff

The Travel Diary of N. Demidoff is a valuable source of observations of the process of penetration into Russian of foreign onomasticon because it is both written in view of its publication, thus respecting certain rules of language, and at the same time it is a travel diary, reflecting the peculiarities of the conversational speech of that time. The abundance of foreign proper names and other international words proves that the author does not adhere to the idea of linguistic purism and considers the foreign vocabulary as an opportunity to expand the representation in Russia of the overseas world. The process of linguistic interaction concerns various levels of the recipient language: phonemes, morphemes, words, phrases, syntactic constructions. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate that the onomastic system is most permeable to the influence of foreign languages, since the proprial unit is matched with a new object and concept borrowed from another culture. This is the viewpoint, from which we will approach the analysis of proper nouns in the Travel Diary of N. Demidoff.