Humanities & Social Sciences 2 (2017 10) 228-237 ~ ~ ~ УДК 81-112; 81-115; 81’255; 81’42 Sacral Communication in its Contrastive Aspect (as Exemplified by Latin, Old Greek and Germanic Languages) Rimma A. Ivanova* National Research University Higher School of Economics 25/12 Bolshaya Pecherskaya Str., Nizhny Novgorod, 603155, Russia Received 18.10.2016, received in revised form 26.11.2016, accepted 04.02.2017 The article concerns the research of functional peculiarities of multilingual religious discourse in its diachronic aspect. <...> The author considers the religious discourse as a means that conveys a complex of meanings of a sacral text regarding the mentality, religious experience and objective reality of the people speaking a certain language in a certain historic period, the discourse being consistently reproduced in time and space. <...> Their contrastive analysis is worthwhile only when historical, chronological, sociocultural and situational factors which have some impact on the meaning of a sacral text are taken into consideration, a sacral text being an object for translation. <...> Since translators were traditionally expected to observe the compulsory rules of preserving the meaning and structure of the source text, their translations either distorted the text meaning or were not fully accurate in the meaning conveyed. <...> Introduction Expansion of the scope of linguistic researches, involving a comprehensive study of various viewpoints and conceptions with a similar subject of the research, approach, or innovative research method is typical for modern communicative linguistics. <...> The object of the religiosity phenomenon and the nature of sacral language analysis in the theory of discourse framework is an act of sacral Rimma A. Ivanova. <...> In its modern sense, the discourse is considered as a complex communicative phenomenon rooted in socio-cultural, historicalchronological, situational factors and comprising extra-linguistic information (in addition to the text) which primarily implies the communicants’ knowledge about the world, their different views and concepts, the speaker’s pragmatic objectives necessary for a comprehensive understanding of the text, etc. <...> It is a special type of discourse represented in various forms in a narrowly focused field of spiritual communication between people of different faiths. <...> The religious discourse implies the knowledge not of the sacral texts only, but also the religious background knowledge which makes the meaning <...>