From 2009 to 2020 researchers from St Petersburg State University and the Institute of Linguistic Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences have been working on a project to create a dictionary of German-language texts by Mikhail Lomonosov. The basic principle of the dictionary implies the complete coverage of lexicon, regardless of the status and frequency of individual words. One of the major tasks of the dictionary is to demonstrate the personality of Lomonosov as a thinker and creator, who was fluent in several languages, using linguistic material. M. V. Lomonosov’s German dictionary is a bilingual dictionary that provides a lexicographic description of words belonging to texts of different genres (letters, business documents, scientific and educational texts). The structure of dictionary entries includes extensive historical, sociolinguistic, biographical comments. The material of Lomonosov’s German-language texts made it possible to reveal a number of linguistic facts that characterize the nuances of the functioning of individual words within his idiolect, including nouns in the role of addresses, proper names (anthroponyms, toponyms, ideonyms), verbs, functional words and abbreviations. These facts include the frequency of certain lexical units, their collocability, use in a figurative context, sociocultural coloring, etc. The results of the project allow us to expand our understanding of the multifaceted personality of Lomonosov and at the same time place his German texts in the context of the German language of the 18th century. Refs 16.

M. Lomonosov’s texts in German provide numerous examples of word spelling inconsistency, e. g. Freiheit/Freyheit, Dero/dero, etc. The influencing factors for this are Lomonosov’s individual style and the scientific and educational discourse of 18th century Russia. The research focuses on the alternation of g/h and g/сh. The alternation at the beginning of a morpheme (Staffengagen/Staffenhagen) can be explained by the similarity in the pronunciation of the German letters g and h in Russian educational tradition. As possible reasons for the alternation in the intervocal position after i (abziegen/abzihen) and ei (verzeigen/ Verzeigung/verzeihen), one can point at voicing of a voiceless consonant /h/ in the position between two vowels and Russian spiranta /ɤ/ functioning as a variant of the phoneme /g/. In the final position of a word, the alternation of g / ch is observed in adjectives with the suffix -lich, causing a deviation from the standard spelling in the words neulig and unmöglig. In this case, the explanation could lie in the fact that in the German language, two productive derivational suffixes -ig and -lich exist, similar in form and in semantics. Also in the German texts of Lomonosov one can find variants Petersburg/Petersburch with alternating g/сh at the end of a word. The tradition of substituting -urch for -urg in place names survives in Russian grammar textbooks for foreigners up to mid–19th century as Russian г is pronounced as /x/ at the end of some words. Refs 22.