Tönnie's Fonne

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Cover sheet of the manual with the owner's note: "Tonnies Fonne gehordt düt Boek"

Tönnies Fonne , also Thomas Funne , (* after 1586 probably in Lübeck ; † after 1627 ) wrote a Middle Low German manual for the Russian language in 1607 as a clerk in the Lübeck trading office in Pleskau .

Life and meaning

Fonne was probably born as the son of the Lübeck merchant and Novgorod driver Hans Fonne († 1605). Around 1607 he worked as a merchant's assistant in the 1603 newly refurbished Lübecker Hof in Pleskau, the former trading post of the Hanseatic League . In Lübeck documents he was first mentioned in 1617 when he acquired citizenship, in the same year with his marriage in the church records of the Petrikirche and after several other entries in the books of this church, then last documented in 1627 in connection with the sale of his parents' house in Lübeck.

Its personal importance for Slavic studies was only revealed when a reading error was discovered in 1973. The author of a manuscript in the Danish Royal Library in Copenhagen had always been wrongly read as Tönnies Fenne up to this point . This was associated with the idea of ​​an older Baltic German .

In the manual in the Royal Library there is the note in the same manuscript: Tonnies Fonne hordt düt Boek / Anno 1607 September 1st. / written to Pleschow . This is now assigned to the young Lübeck merchant's assistant, whose activity in the Russian trade of Novgorod drivers in the broadest sense is also plausible due to the origin.

On its originally 566 pages, the manuscript contains a Low German-North-West Russian dictionary, a collection of slang idioms and proverbs from the Russian language, templates for correspondence and conversation patterns, as they were necessary for the handling of commercial transactions between merchants in the Low German-speaking area with Russian merchants. This is why it is also referred to as a “conversation book” in the scientific literature.

In 1609, Fonne gave the manuscript away to a Hinrich Wistinghusen - as noted by hand on it - apparently because he no longer needed it for his own work or because he had meanwhile memorized the written knowledge.

This manuscript was created at the time of the attempted rebuilding of trade in Russia by the Lübeck merchants, which was difficult even after the Peace of Stettin (1570). It was not until a high-ranking delegation trip led by Lübeck Mayor Conrad Garmers to Moscow in 1603 that the foreign trade-friendly Tsar Boris Godunow returned the Hanseatic trading post in Pleskau to Lübeck; as early as 1605, with the death of the tsar, there was again considerable uncertainty in Russia. The know-how of the local merchants and diplomats like Zacharias Meier had to be partly re-developed after these lengthy trade interruptions and difficulties.

When the Danish Imperial Councilor and Count Otto Thott (1703–1785) died, who maintained Denmark's largest private library with around 140,000 volumes, including 6,000 incunabula , at his Gavnø Castle near Næstved and in his house in Copenhagen, Palais Thott collected 4,000 manuscripts, including Fonne's manual, and the older printed works of his estate from the period up to around 1530 in the holdings of the Royal Library.

Works

  • Tönnies Fenne's Low German Manual of spoken Russian. Pskov 1607, new ed. in two volumes by L. Hammerich, R. Jakobson a. a., Copenhagen 1961 and 1970, Volume 3 by A. van der Baar, Copenhagen 1985, and Volume 4 by Hans Joachim Gernentz , Copenhagen 1986.

literature

  • Dirk Erpenbeck: The Fonne merchant families from Westphalia in Lübeck's Russian trade. Biographical notes on the writer of the Pleskau conversation book from 1607, Tönnies Fonne , in Zeitschrift für Ostforschung 42 (1993), pp. 548-62.
  • Pickhan, Gertrud: "" Wan Ich Frolich Sy so Hebbe Ich Dy Gerne . Basic pattern of intercultural everyday communication between Germans and Russians in the Tönnies Fonne's conversation book (1607). " Yearbooks for the History of Eastern Europe, New Series , 49, no.4 (2001): 500-09. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41050816 .

Sources and Notes

  1. ↑ P. Jeannin: The Lübeck Tönnies Fonne. A pioneer of Slavic studies. In: Hansische Geschichtsblätter 91 (1973), pp. 50-53.
  2. ↑ Signature: Thott 1104-4 °
  3. ↑ Pleskau was the station of the land drivers who traveled overland from Riga or Reval mostly by sledge to Novgorod to the Peterhof office there .
  4. ↑ King John III. from Sweden did not allow the Narva journey again until 1581. Tsar Fyodor showed concessions; but trade was now clearly dependent on the territorial princes.
  5. ↑ Today the French Embassy in Denmark.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Fonne, Tönnies
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Funne, Thomas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Author of a manual of the Russian language
DATE OF BIRTH after 1586
PLACE OF BIRTH uncertain: Lübeck
DATE OF DEATH after 1627