Russian vocabulary(a set of words of a language) has gone through a centuries-old path of development, during which some words disappeared, others appeared. This process continues today and will continue to continue, as in any living language on the planet.

Vocabulary in terms of its origin can be divided into primordial And borrowed. Both of these layers, in turn, are heterogeneous in origin and time of appearance of the words (lexemes) included in them.

We will start the story about this with the original vocabulary: it is she who makes up the main part of the vocabulary of the Russian language. As for the exact number of native words, it is difficult to establish it, and different researchers give different estimates here. In most cases, the proportion of native vocabulary is determined in the range of 80-90% (or even more) of the total vocabulary.

Aboriginal those words are called that were formed in the given language from the morphemes available in it or were inherited from the more ancient "ancestor language". For example, the original vocabulary of the modern Russian language includes not only words that were formed on Russian soil in the last two centuries, but also inherited from the period of the 16th - 18th centuries, Old Russian, Proto-Slavic, Proto-Indo-European languages ​​... Let's consider these layers in chronological order.

Indo-Europeanisms

This is the conditional name of the most ancient Russian words that we inherited from the era of Proto-Indo-European linguistic unity. Proto-Indo-European is restored hypothetically; it presumably existed in the 5th - 4th millennium BC. e. As a result of the collapse into numerous dialects, it gave rise to most of the languages ​​\u200b\u200bof present-day Europe and some Asian ones (the Indo-European language family).

Indo-Europeanisms for the most part represent the names of specific objects, qualities and actions; there are few designations of abstract concepts among them. All these words have close "relatives" not only in Slavic, but also in other languages ​​of the Indo-European family. Of course, the "descendants" of the same Proto-Indo-European word in modern languages ​​look somewhat different: over the course of many centuries they have changed and accumulated some phonetic, structural and semantic differences. Here are examples of related words dating back to the Proto-Indo-European era:

Russian sky- German Nebel‘fog’ - Greek nephos‘sky, cloud’ (more about the etymology of the word sky cm. );

Russian son- Lithuanian sunus- German sohn– English son;

Russian sheep- latin ovis- ancient Indian avikaḥ and etc.

In addition to those listed, Indo-Europeanisms in Russian include the words:

mother, daughter, brother, sister, daughter-in-law, nose, tooth, ear, eye, night, water, moon, snow, fire, goose, deer, house, honey, oak, seed, grain, bronze, price, name, new, left, first, have, take, sob, sew, grind, tear, two, three etc. As you can see, among them there are terms of kinship, designations of animals, parts of the body, actions, qualities, quantity.

Common Slavic vocabulary

The Proto-Slavic (common Slavic) language is one of the "descendants" of Proto-Indo-European. In turn, it is the common ancestor of all the languages ​​of the Slavic group. The time of its existence is not precisely established, usually the period from the second or middle of the first millennium BC to the middle of the first millennium BC is called. e. until the 6th-7th centuries AD. e.

Common Slavic vocabulary includes words that arose in the Proto-Slavic language and were absent before. At the same time, they were usually created on the basis of the Proto-Indo-European roots directly inherited by the Slavs; rarely - on the basis of borrowings (for example, from the languages ​​\u200b\u200bof the Germanic group). At present, Russian words of common Slavic origin have close correspondences in other Slavic languages ​​and do not have such correspondences in other languages ​​of the Indo-European family.

Let's take as an example the word father. It came to modern Russian from the Proto-Slavic era, where it was formed on the basis of a modified Indo-European root * at-(from children's speech) using a suffix *-ĭ kŏs. As a result of subsequent changes, the word took on the form * otbkb> * otbcb where did the old Russian otts, and then the modern Russian version. There are close analogues in other Slavic languages: Ukrainian father, Bulgarian father, Serbo-Croatian thatz, Slovenian oce, Czech otec, Polish ojciec, Upper Lusatian wotc and others. The Proto-Indo-European designation of the father was lost by the Slavs (cf. German Vater, Latin Pater, English father etc.).

Let us give other examples of Russian words of Proto-Slavic origin. For the most part, they mean:

- body parts of humans and animals ( throat, head, hand, side, mane, hair, face, snout, nail, hoof);

— kinship terms ( father-in-law, mother-in-law, stepfather, stepmother, son-in-law, grandson);

- periods and time intervals ( spring, year, summer, tomorrow, morning, month);

- household items needle, barrel, bucket, broom, thread, lock, mirror, candle, oil);

- natural objects and phenomena ( stream, frost, storm, thunder, lake, island, valley, sun, star, earth, ice);

- plants ( carrots, wheat, viburnum, cranberries, oats, spruce, birch);

- domestic and wild animals, insects ( dog, bear, horse, fish, lynx, bison, bull, bee, caterpillar, snake, eagle, hedgehog, stallion, owl, hare);

— minerals ( clay, tin, sand, iron, gold, silver, lead, copper);

- tools, tools and activities ( pincers, harrow, rake, oar, harp, knife, chisel, hunting, spear);

- faces, people guest, witch, potter, people, bride, groom, boy, shepherd);

- abstract concepts ( struggle, punishment, fear, weight, grief, sin, gift, happiness, defense, image, laughter);

- actions ( to roll, cook, bathe, patch, breathe, heal, drive, bite, get, crush, ride, spare);

- signs and qualities ( important, stupid, deep, fast, great, old, expensive, green, red, gray, left).

Of course, only the most extensive semantic categories are listed here; they do not exhaust all the richness of the common Slavic vocabulary in the Russian language. In general, there are about two thousand Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Slavic lexemes in modern Russian. On the one hand, this is not much; on the other hand, these words are still very common, and in our everyday communication their share is about a quarter. In addition to nouns, verbs and adjectives, there are also numerals, pronouns, adverbs and auxiliary parts of speech.

East Slavic (Old Russian) vocabulary

The linguistic community of the East Slavic tribes was formed around the 7th - 9th centuries. and lasted until the XIV - XV centuries. These tribes, whose language is now called East Slavic or Old Russian, became the ancestors of today's Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians. The state on whose territory the glades, drevlyans, vyatichi, northerners, krivichi and many other Slavic and non-Slavic ethnic groups of that period lived, now we call Ancient Russia.

Ancient Russian by origin, the original vocabulary was formed for the most part on the basis of common Slavic, sometimes on the basis of borrowings (from Greek, Germanic, Turkic languages). There are close correspondences to Russian words that came from Ancient Rus' in the Ukrainian and Belarusian languages, but as a rule, there are no such correspondences in the Western and South Slavic languages.

squirrel, jackdaw, drake, bullfinch, nephew, snowfall, gaze, inheritance(‘region, territory’), bagpipe, blade, casket, ruble, carpenter, shoemaker, cook, healer, village, settlement, trap, benefit, fun, secluded, healing, vigilant, sudden, start, wag, appease, flicker, beckon, get used to, kind and etc.

Proper Russian vocabulary

From the XIV - XV centuries. the era of the separate existence of the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian languages ​​begins. All original words that have appeared in the Russian language since that time are called properly Russian. They make up the majority of our vocabulary.

This is the largest and most diverse layer of Russian vocabulary. It was created and is being created on the basis of primordial words inherited by the language from earlier periods of its development, as well as on the basis of borrowings. As for the latter, usually native vocabulary also includes such words that were formed from foreign words according to the rules of Russian word formation, with the help of Russian affixes. For example, words highway, tea, manicure are not native in Russian and belong to borrowed vocabulary. But tokens highway, teapot, manicurist already formed in the Russian language according to its rules, therefore they are considered primordial. Some researchers refer them to an intermediate layer of vocabulary between native and borrowed words.

In addition, words that consist entirely of foreign morphemes can also be primordially Russian. For example: astronaut, activist, rocket launcher. These lexemes originated in the Russian language, created by its speakers, and not taken from outside. In foreign languages, they are either absent altogether, or are borrowings from Russian.

Literature:

Shansky N. M. Essays on Russian word formation and lexicology. - M., 1959.

Rozental D. E., Golub I. B., Telenkova M. A. Modern Russian language. - M., 2017.

Shansky N.M., Ivanov V.V. Modern Russian language: In 3 parts. - Ch. I. - M., 1987.

Marinova E. V. Foreign vocabulary of the modern Russian language. - M., 2012.

Chernykh P. Ya. Historical and etymological dictionary of the modern Russian language: In 2 volumes. - M., 1999.

Shansky N. M., Ivanov V. V., Shanskaya T. V. Brief etymological dictionary of the Russian language. - M., 1971.

1. How many words are there in Russian?

The state of the Russian language at the end of the 20th century is alarming. It seems that along with the depopulation of the country, there is a delexication of its language, an impoverishment of its vocabulary. This is striking especially in contrast to the dynamic development of the Russian language in the 19th century and the explosive dynamics of a number of European and Asian languages ​​in the 20th century. In the 19th century, the Russian linguistic space was rapidly filling up, Dahl's dictionary was bursting with an abundance of words, however, even then they were already turned rather to the past than to the future - to ancient crafts, crafts, things of homespun life, to human existence in nature and agriculture. But also moral, mental phenomena are presented abundantly: there are few roots, but how many derivatives, for one root “good” - about 200 words! Densely expanded, magnificently, it seems, another century of rapid development - and the population of this plain will become denser, and it will become cheerful from a variety of faces, voices, meanings.

However, in the 20th century, the language began to decline, two or three times, if not more, its crown thinned out, branches broke off, and black stumps remained from many roots, on which several branches barely hold on. The most alarming thing is that the primordially Russian roots slowed down and even stopped growing in the 20th century, and many branches were cut down. Dahl has about 150 words in the root nest -love-, from “loving” to “generous”, from “loving” to “fornication” (this still does not include prefixes). The four-volume Academic Dictionary of 1982 contains 41 words.
Even if we take into account that the Academic Dictionary is more normative in terms of the selection of words, it cannot but be alarming that the root “love” has not grown at all for a hundred years: not a single new branching on this word tree, which is quickly losing its magnificent crown. The same thing with the nest -good-: out of 200 words, 56 remained. Or here is the root “lep”, from which the words came down to us: sculpt, sculpt, sculpt, stucco, stucco, cake. There are no other non-prefixed words beginning with this root in modern dictionaries. And Dahl has: modeling, modeling, modeling, modeling, modeling, modeling, modeling, modeling, modeling, modeling, modeling, modeling, modeling, cake, modeling, cake, cake, cake, cake, cake, cake, cake, cake, cake, flattened, flattened, flattened. There were twenty-six branches at the root, seven remained.

In all dictionaries of the Russian language of the Soviet era, published over the course of 70 years, a total of about 125 thousand words are given. This is very little for a developed language, with a great literary past and, hopefully, a great future. For comparison: in the Dictionary of V. Dahl - 200 thousand words. In modern English - about 750 thousand words: in the third edition of Webster's (1961) - 450 thousand, in the complete Oxford (1992) - 500 thousand, and more than half of the words in these dictionaries do not match. In modern German, according to various estimates, from 185 to 300 thousand words.

When I ask my philologically observant friends what words the Russian language has enriched in recent years, they begin to pour out Anglicisms. No, please, with Russian roots, - I clarify the question. The revival quickly fades, and with difficulty, “voice”, “scumbag”, “lawlessness”, “disassembly”, “run over”, “steam” (“strain”) and several other equally old and mostly low-born (thieves) are extracted from memory ) words that jumped out of rags to riches; The list hasn't changed in years.
Meanwhile, over the five years of the new century, the English language has been enriched with thousands of new words (and hence realities, concepts, ideas) created on its own root basis. I will give a few examples related only to such a narrow area of ​​modern Anglo-American culture as literary activity: backstory (the factual, documentary basis of fiction); banalysis (banalization, banal analysis); blog (blog, personal online diary or forum); belligerati (writers - supporters of war and imperialism); carnography (description of violence); bibliotherapy (bibliotherapy); fanfic (works created on the theme of a particular film or TV show by its fans); faxlore, xeroxlore (modern urban folklore distributed by fax or xerox); fictomercial (a work in which the writer inserts the names of the company and its products for a fee); glurge (a sentimental story distributed by email); Internetese (seteyaz, the language of network communication) ...

If the English language increased its vocabulary several times during the 20th century, the Russian language rather suffered losses and currently has, according to the most generous estimates, no more than 150 thousand lexical units.
The newest "Big Academic Dictionary of the Russian Language", the first volume of which was published in 2005 by the St. Petersburg Institute of Linguistic Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences, is designed for 20 volumes, many years of preparation and publication. It is supposed to include only 150 thousand words - and this is taking into account everything that the post-Soviet years brought to the language.

At the same time, it should be recognized that in the dictionaries of the Russian language there are a huge number of “inflated” units - suffix formations of a rather inflectional rather than word-forming order. No matter how bitter it is to admit it, the idea of ​​the lexical richness of the Russian language is largely based on diminutive suffixes, which triple, and often even quintuple, the number of nouns officially numbered in dictionaries.

Philologist, philosopher, culturologist, essayist. Since 1990 Professor of Cultural Theory, Russian and Comparative Literature at Emory University (Atlanta, USA). Member of the Writers' Union (since 1978), PEN Club and the Academy of Russian Modern Literature. Author of 16 books and about 500 articles and essays translated into 14 foreign languages, including “Philosophy of the possible” (St. Petersburg, 2001), “Space sign. On the Future of the Humanities” (M., 2004), “Postmodern in Russian Literature” (M., 2005), “All Essays”, in 2 vols. (Yekaterinburg, 2005). Author of network projects “Intelnet”, “Book of Books”, “Gift of the Word. Projective Dictionary of the Russian Language” and “Fan of Futures. Techno-Humanitarian Bulletin”. Winner of the Andrey Bely Prize (St. Petersburg, 1991) and the Liberty Prize (New York, 2000) for his contribution to Russian-American culture.

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The origin of the vocabulary of the modern Russian language

The vocabulary of the modern Russian language has come a long way of development. Our vocabulary consists not only of native Russian words, but also of words borrowed from other languages. Foreign sources replenished and enriched the Russian language throughout the entire process of its historical development. Some borrowings were made in antiquity, others relatively recently.

Replenishment of Russian vocabulary went in two directions.

  1. New words were created from word-forming elements (roots, suffixes, prefixes) available in the language. Thus, the original Russian vocabulary expanded and developed.
  2. New words were poured into the Russian language from other languages ​​as a result of the economic, political and cultural ties of the Russian people with other peoples.

The composition of Russian vocabulary in terms of its origin can be schematically represented in the table.

Vocabulary of the modern Russian language

Original Russian vocabulary

The original Russian vocabulary is heterogeneous in origin: it consists of several layers, which differ in the time of their formation.

The most ancient among the original Russian words are Indo-Europeanisms - words that have survived from the era of Indo-European linguistic unity. According to scientists, in the V-IV millennium BC. e. there was an ancient Indo-European civilization that united tribes living on a rather vast territory. So, according to the studies of some linguists, it stretched from the Volga to the Yenisei, others believe that it was the Balkan-Danubian, or South Russian, localization1 Indo-European linguistic community gave rise to European and some Asian languages ​​(for example, Bengali, Sanskrit).

Words denoting plants, animals, metals and minerals, tools, forms of management, types of kinship, etc. go back to the Indo-European parent language: oak, salmon, goose, wolf, sheep, copper, bronze, honey, mother, son, daughter, night, moon, snow, water, new, sew, etc.

Another layer of native Russian vocabulary consists of common Slavic words inherited by our language from common Slavic (proto-Slavic), which served as a source for all Slavic languages. This language-base existed in the prehistoric era on the territory between the Dnieper, Bug and Vistula rivers, inhabited by ancient Slavic tribes. By the VI-VII centuries. n. e. the common Slavic language fell apart, opening the way for the development of Slavic languages, including Old Russian. Common Slavic words are easily distinguished in all Slavic languages, the common origin of which is obvious even in our time.

There are a lot of nouns among common Slavic words. These are, first of all, concrete nouns: head, throat, beard, heart, palm; field, mountain, forest, birch, maple, ox, cow, pig; sickle, pitchfork, knife, net, neighbor, guest, servant, friend; shepherd, spinner, potter. There are also abstract nouns, but there are fewer of them: faith, will, guilt, sin, happiness, glory, rage, thought.

From other parts of speech in the common Slavic vocabulary, verbs are presented: see, hear, grow, lie; adjectives: kind, young, old, wise, cunning; numerals: one, two, three; pronouns: I, you, we, you; pronominal adverbs: where, as well as some service parts of speech: over, a, and, yes, but, etc.

The common Slavic vocabulary has about two thousand words, however, this relatively small vocabulary is the core of the Russian dictionary, it includes the most common, stylistically neutral words used both in oral and written speech.

The Slavic languages, which had the ancient Proto-Slavic language as their source, separated themselves into three groups according to sound, grammatical and lexical features: southern, western and eastern.

The third layer of primordially Russian words consists of East Slavic (Old Russian) vocabulary, which developed on the basis of the language of the Eastern Slavs, one of the three groups of ancient Slavic languages. The East Slavic linguistic community developed by the 7th-9th centuries. n. e. on the territory of Eastern Europe. The tribal unions that lived here go back to the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalities. Therefore, the words that have remained in our language from this period are known, as a rule, both in Ukrainian and in Belarusian, but are absent in the languages ​​of the Western and Southern Slavs.

As part of the East Slavic vocabulary, one can distinguish: 1) the names of animals, birds: dog, squirrel, jackdaw, drake, bullfinch; 2) names of tools: axe, blade; 3) names of household items: boots, ladle, chest, ruble; 4) names of people by profession: carpenter, cook, shoemaker, miller; 5) names of settlements: village, settlement and other lexical-semantic groups.

The fourth layer of primordially Russian words is the native Russian vocabulary, which was formed after the 14th century, i.e., in the era of the independent development of the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian languages. These languages ​​already have their own equivalents for words belonging to the proper Russian vocabulary. Wed lexical units:

Actually Russian words are distinguished, as a rule, by a derivative basis: a mason, a leaflet, a locker room, a community, an intervention, etc.

It should be emphasized that in the composition of the Russian vocabulary itself there may also be words with foreign roots that have passed the path of Russian word formation and have acquired Russian suffixes, prefixes: partisanship, non-party, aggressiveness; ruler, glass, teapot; words with a complex stem: a radio station, a steam locomotive, as well as many complex abbreviated words that replenished our language in the 20th century: Moscow Art Theater, timber industry, wall newspaper, etc.

The original Russian vocabulary continues to be replenished with words that are created on the basis of the word-formation resources of the language, as a result of a wide variety of processes characteristic of Russian word formation.

See also the new theory of the ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans Gamkrelidze T.V., Ivanov V.V. Indo-European language and Indo-Europeans. Reconstruction and historical-typological analysis of proto-language and proto-culture. Tbilisi, 1984.

Borrowings from Slavic languages

A special place in the composition of Russian vocabulary among Slavic borrowings is occupied by Old Slavonic words, or Old Slavonicisms (Church Slavonicisms). These are the words of the most ancient Slavic language, well known in Rus' since the spread of Christianity (988).

Being the language of liturgical books, the Old Slavonic language was at first far from colloquial speech, but over time it experiences a noticeable influence of the East Slavic language and, in turn, leaves its mark on the language of the people. Russian chronicles reflect numerous cases of mixing of these related languages.

The influence of the Old Church Slavonic language was very fruitful, it enriched our language, made it more expressive and flexible. In particular, Old Slavic words began to be used in Russian vocabulary, denoting abstract concepts for which there were no names yet.

As part of the Old Slavonicisms that have replenished the Russian vocabulary, several groups can be distinguished: 1) words that go back to the common Slavic language, having East Slavic variants of a different sound or affixal design: gold, night, fisherman, boat; 2) Old Slavonicisms, which do not have consonant Russian words: finger, mouth, cheeks, persi (cf. Russian: finger, lips, cheeks, chest); 3) semantic Old Slavonicisms, that is, common Slavic words that received a new meaning in the Old Slavonic language associated with Christianity: god, sin, sacrifice, fornication.

Old Slavonic borrowings have characteristic phonetic, derivational and semantic features.

The phonetic features of Old Slavonicisms include:

  • disagreement, i.e. combinations -ra-, -la-, -re-, -le- between consonants in place of full-vowel Russians -oro-, -olo-, -ere-, -ele, -elo- as part of one morpheme: brada - beard, youth - youth, a series - a series, a helmet - a helmet, a milk - milk,
  • combinations of ra-, la- at the beginning of the word in place of Russian ro-, lorab, boat; cf. east slavic rob, boat,
  • a combination of zhd in place of Russian w, ascending to a single common Slavic consonance: clothing, hope, between; cf. East Slavic: clothes, hope, between;
  • consonant u in place of Russian h, also ascending to the same common Slavic consonance: night, daughter; cf. East Slavic: night, daughter,
  • the vowel e at the beginning of the word in place of the Russian o deer, one, cf. East Slavic: deer, one;
  • the vowel e under stress before a hard consonant in place of the Russian o (e): cross, sky; cf. godfather, palate.

Other Old Church Slavonicisms retain Old Slavonic prefixes, suffixes, a complex stem characteristic of Old Church Slavonic word formation:

  • prefixes voz-, from-, bottom-, through-, pre-, pre-: sing, exile, send down, extraordinary, transgress, predict;
  • suffixes -stvi(e), -eni(e), -ani(e), -zn, -tv(a), -h(s), -ush-, -yush-, -ash-, -yash-: advent, prayer, torment, execution, prayer, helmsman, leading, knowing, screaming, smashing;
  • complex foundations with elements typical of Old Slavonicism: God-fearing, good-naturedness, malevolence, superstition, gluttony.

It is also possible to classify Old Slavonicisms based on their semantic and stylistic differences from Russian words.

  1. Most Old Slavonicisms are distinguished by book coloring, solemn, upbeat sound, youth, breg, hand, sing, sacred, imperishable, ubiquitous, etc.
  2. Those that do not stand out stylistically from the rest of the vocabulary (many of them replaced the corresponding East Slavic variants by duplicating their meaning) sharply differ from such Old Slavonicisms: helmet, sweet, work, moisture; cf. obsolete Old Russian: shelom, licorice, vologa.
  3. A special group is made up of Old Slavonicisms, used along with Russian variants that have received a different meaning in the language: dust - gunpowder, betray - transfer, head (of government) - head, citizen - city dweller, etc.

The Old Church Slavonicisms of the second and third groups are not perceived by the speakers of the modern Russian language as alien - they have become so Russified that they practically do not differ from native Russian words. Unlike such, genetic, Old Slavonicisms, the words of the first group retain their connection with the Old Slavonic, bookish language; many of them in the last century were an integral part of the poetic vocabulary: Persian, cheeks, mouth, sweet, voice, hair, golden, young, etc. Now they are perceived as poeticisms, and G.O. Vinokur called them stylistic Slavisms1

From other closely related Slavic languages, separate words came to the Russian language, which practically do not stand out among the original Russian vocabulary. From the Ukrainian and Belarusian languages, the names of household items were borrowed, for example, Ukrainianisms: borscht, dumplings, dumplings, hopak. A lot of words came to us from the Polish language: town, monogram, harness, zrazy, gentry. Through the Polish language, Czech and other Slavic words were borrowed: ensign, impudent, angle, etc.

1 See. Vinokur G.O. On Slavicisms in the Modern Russian Literary Language // Selected Works in the Russian Language, Moscow, 1959. P. 443.

Borrowings from non-Slavic languages

The history of our people was reflected in the borrowing of foreign words by the Russian language in different eras. Economic, political, cultural contacts with other countries, military clashes left their mark on the development of the language.

The very first borrowings from non-Slavic languages ​​penetrated into the Russian language as early as the 8th-12th centuries. From the Scandinavian languages ​​(Swedish, Norwegian) came to us words related to sea fishing: skerry, anchor, hook, hook, proper names: Rurik, Oleg, Olga, Igor, Askold. In the official business speech of Ancient Rus', the now obsolete words vira, tiun, sneak, brand were used. From the Finno-Ugric languages, we borrowed the names of fish: whitefish, navaga, salmon, herring, shark, smelt, herring, as well as some words associated with the life of northern peoples: sleigh, tundra, snowstorm, sledges, dumplings, etc.

Among the ancient borrowings are individual words from the Germanic languages: armor, sword, shell, cauldron, hill, beech, prince, boron, pig, camel and others. Scientists argue about the origin of some words, so the number of borrowings from the ancient Germanic languages ​​seems ambiguous to different researchers (from 20 to 200 words).

The close proximity of the Turkic peoples (Polovtsy, Pechenegs, Khazars), military clashes with them, and then the Mongol-Tatar invasion left Turkic words in the Russian language. They relate mainly to the nomadic life of these peoples, clothing, utensils: quiver, lasso, pack, hut, beshmet, sash, heel, pouch, kumach, chest, flail, shackles, bondage, treasury, guard, etc.

The most significant influence on the language of Ancient Rus' was the influence of the Greek language. Kievan Rus conducted a lively trade with Byzantium, and the penetration of Greek elements into Russian vocabulary began even before the adoption of Christianity in Rus' (VI century) and intensified under the influence of Christian culture in connection with the baptism of the Eastern Slavs (IX century), the distribution of liturgical books translated from Greek into Old Church Slavonic.

Greek in origin are many names of household items, vegetables, fruits: cherry, cucumber, doll, ribbon, tub, beet, lantern, bench, bath; words related to science, education: grammar, mathematics, history, philosophy, notebook, alphabet, dialect; borrowings from the field of religion: angel, altar, pulpit, anathema, archimandrite, antichrist, archbishop, demon, oil, gospel, icon, incense, cell, schema, icon lamp, monk, monastery, sexton, archpriest, memorial service, etc.

Later borrowings from the Greek language refer exclusively to the sphere of sciences and arts. Many Greekisms came to us through other European languages ​​and are widely used in scientific terminology that has received universal recognition: logic, psychology, pulpit, idyll, idea, climate, criticism, metal, museum, magnet, syntax, lexicon, comedy, tragedy, chronograph, planet, stage, stage, theater and so on.

The Latin language also played a significant role in the enrichment of Russian vocabulary (including terminology), associated mainly with the sphere of scientific, technical and socio-political life. The words ascend to the Latin source: author, administrator, audience, student, exam, external, minister, justice, operation, censorship, dictatorship, republic, deputy, delegate, rector, excursion, expedition, revolution, constitution, etc. These Latinisms came to our language, as well as to other European languages, not only through direct contact of the Latin language with any other (which, of course, was not excluded, especially through various educational institutions), but also through other languages. Latin in many European states was the language of literature, science, official papers and religion (Catholicism). Scientific writings up to the XVIII century. often written in Latin; medicine still uses Latin. All this contributed to the creation of an international fund of scientific terminology, which was mastered by many European languages, including Russian.

In our time, scientific terms are often created from Greek and Latin roots, denoting concepts unknown in the era of antiquity: astronaut [gr. kos-mos - Universe + gr. nautes - (sea) - swimmer]; futurology (lat. futurum - future + gr. logos - word, doctrine); scuba gear (Latin aqua - water + English lung - light). This is due to the exceptional productivity of Latin and Greek roots included in various scientific terms, as well as their international character, which facilitates the understanding of such foundations in different languages.

The later lexical influence of European languages ​​on Russian began to be felt in the 16th-17th centuries. and especially intensified in the Petrine era, in the XVIII century. The transformation of all aspects of Russian life under Peter I, his administrative and military reforms, the success of education, the development of science - all this contributed to the enrichment of Russian vocabulary with foreign words. These were numerous names of then new household items, military and naval terms, words from the field of science and art.

The following words were borrowed from the German language: sandwich, tie, decanter, hat, office, package, price list, percentage, accountant, bill, share, agent, camp, headquarters, commander, junker, corporal, gun carriage, bandoleer, workbench, jointer, nickel, quartz, saltpeter, wolfral, potatoes, onions.

Maritime terms came from the Dutch language: shipyard, harbor, pennant, berth, drift, pilot, sailor, raid, yard, rudder, fleet, flag, fairway, skipper, navigator, boat, ballast.

Maritime terms were also borrowed from English: boat, brig, barge, schooner, yacht, midshipman. The influence of the English language turned out to be relatively stable: words penetrated from it into the Russian language throughout the entire 19th century. and later. So, words from the sphere of public relations, technical and sports terms, names of household items go back to this source: leader, department, rally, boycott, parliament, station, elevator, dock, budget, square, cottage, trolleybus, rail, mac, beefsteak , pudding, rum, whiskey, grog, cake, plaid, sweater, jacket, jacket, finish, sports, athlete, football, basketball, volleyball, boxing, croquet, poker, hockey, jockey, bridge, spinning, etc.

The French language left a significant mark in Russian vocabulary. The first gallicisms penetrated into it in the Petrine era, and then, at the end of the 18th - beginning of the 19th centuries, in connection with the gallomania of secular society, borrowings from the French language became especially popular. Among them are everyday words: suit, hood, corset, corsage, jacket, vest, coat, coat, blouse, tailcoat, bracelet, veil, jabot, floor, furniture, chest of drawers, study, sideboard, salon, toilet, dressing table, chandelier , lampshade, curtain, service, footman, broth, cutlet, cream, stew, dessert, marmalade, ice cream, etc.; military terms: vanguard, captain, sergeant, artillery, march, arena, cavalry, redoubt, attack, breach, battalion, salute, garrison, courier, general, lieutenant, dugout, recruit, sapper, cornet corps, landing force, fleet, squadron.

Many words from the field of art also date back to the French language: mezzanine, parterre, play, actor, prompter, director, intermission, foyer, plot, role, stage, repertoire, farce, ballet, genre, role, stage. All these words became the property of our language, therefore, there was a borrowing not only of names, but also of concepts necessary for the enrichment of Russian culture. Some French borrowings, reflecting the narrow circle of interests of an exquisite noble society, did not take root on Russian soil and fell into disuse: rendezvous, pleisir, politeness, and so on.

Some Italian words also came to us through the French language: baroque, carbonary, dome, mezzanine, mosaic, cavalier, pantaloons, gasoline, arch, barricade, watercolor, credit, corridor, bastion, carnival, arsenal, bandit, balcony, charlatan, basta , balustrade, etc.

Musical terms came from Italian to all European languages, including Russian: adagio, arioso, aria, viola, bass, cello, bandura, cappella, tenor, cavatina, canzone, mandolin, libretto, forte, piano, moderato, etc. The words harpsichord, ballerina, harlequin, opera, impresario, bravo also go back to the Italian source.

There are single borrowings from Spanish, which often penetrated into Russian through French: alcove, guitar, castanets, mantilla, serenade, caramel, vanilla, tobacco, tomato, cigar, lemon, jasmine, banana.

Among foreign borrowings, one should include not only individual words, but also some word-forming elements: Greek prefixes a-, anti-, arches-, pan-: immoral, anti-perestroika, arch-absurd, pan-German; Latin prefixes: de-, counter-, trans-, ultra-, inter-. degradation, counterplay, trans-European, ultra-left, intervocalic; Latin suffixes: -ism, -ist, -or, -tor, etc. tailism, harmonist, combinator. Such prefixes and suffixes have become entrenched not only in the Russian language, they have become internationally widespread.

It should be noted that Russian words are also borrowed by other languages. Moreover, at different periods of our history, not only such Russian words as samovar, borscht, cabbage soup, cranberry, etc. penetrated into other languages, but such as satellite, soviets, perestroika, glasnost. The successes of the Soviet Union in space exploration contributed to the fact that the terms of this sphere born in our language were perceived by other languages. astronaut, lunar rover.

Mastering borrowed words in Russian

Foreign words, getting into our language, are gradually assimilated by it: they adapt to the sound system of the Russian language, obey the rules of Russian word formation and inflection, thus losing, to one degree or another, the features of their non-Russian origin.

First of all, foreign-language features of the sound design of a word are usually eliminated, for example, nasal sounds in borrowings from French or combinations of sounds characteristic of the English language, etc. Then, non-Russian word endings and gender forms change. For example, in the words postman, prompter, pavement, sounds characteristic of the French language (nasal vowels, traced [r]) no longer sound; in the words rally, pudding there is no English back-lingual n, pronounced with the back of the back of the tongue (in transcription [*ng], in addition, the first of them has lost the diphthong; the initial consonants in the words jazz, gin are pronounced with a characteristic Russian articulation, although their combination is for us The Latin word seminarium became a seminary and then a seminar, the Greek analogos became an analog, and analogikos a similar one. not neuter, but feminine: beet.German marschierep receives the Russian suffix -ovat and is converted to march.

Acquiring word-building affixes, borrowed words are included in the grammatical system of the Russian language and obey the relevant norms of inflection: they form paradigms of declensions and conjugations.

Mastering borrowed words usually leads to their semantic changes. Most of the foreign words in the Russian language lose their etymological connections with the related roots of the source language. So, we do not perceive the German words resort, sandwich, hairdresser as words of a complex basis (resort from kurie-rep - “treat” + Ort - “place”; hairdresser - literally “making a wig”; sandwich - “butter” and “bread” )

As a result of deetymologization, the meanings of foreign words become unmotivated.

However, not all borrowings are assimilated by the Russian language to the same extent: there are those that have become so Russified that they do not reveal their foreign origin (cherry, notebook, party, hut, soup, cutlet), while others retain certain features of the original language, thanks to which they stand out in Russian vocabulary as alien words.

Among the borrowings there are words not mastered by the Russian language, which stand out sharply against the background of Russian vocabulary. A special place among such borrowings is occupied by exoticisms - words that characterize the specific features of the life of different peoples and are used to describe non-Russian reality. So, when depicting the life of the peoples of the Caucasus, the words aul, saklya, dzhigit, arba, etc. are used. Exoticisms do not have Russian synonyms, therefore, referring to them when describing national specifics is dictated by necessity.

Barbarisms are allocated to another group, i.e. foreign words transferred to Russian soil, the use of which is of an individual nature. Unlike other lexical borrowings, barbarisms are not recorded in dictionaries of foreign words, and even more so in dictionaries of the Russian language. Barbarisms are not mastered by the language, although over time they can gain a foothold in it. Thus, almost all borrowings, before entering the permanent vocabulary, were for some time barbarisms. For example, V. Mayakovsky used the word camp as barbarism (I am lying, - a tent in a camp), later the borrowing camping became the property of the Russian language.

Foreign-language inclusions in Russian vocabulary adjoin barbarisms: ok, merci, happy end, pater familias. Many of them retain non-Russian spelling, they are popular not only in ours, but also in other languages. In addition, the use of some of them has a long tradition, like alma mater.

Phonetic and morphological features of loanwords

Among the phonetic signs of borrowed words, the following can be distinguished.

  1. Unlike native Russian words that never began with the sound [a] (which would be contrary to the phonetic laws of the Russian language), borrowed words have an initial a: questionnaire, abbot, paragraph, aria, attack, lampshade, arba, angel, anathema.
  2. The initial e is distinguished mainly by Greekisms and Latinisms (Russian words never begin with this non-quoted sound): epoch, era, ethics, exam, execution, effect, floor.
  3. The letter f testifies to the non-Russian source of the word, since the Eastern Slavs did not have the sound [f] and the corresponding graphic sign was used only to designate it in borrowed words: forum, fact, lantern, sofa, film, scam, form, aphorism, ether, profile and under.
  4. The combination of two or more vowels in a word was unacceptable according to the laws of Russian phonetics, so borrowed words are easily distinguished by this feature (the so-called gaping): poet, halo, out, theater, veil, cocoa, radio, punctuation.
  5. The consonances ge, ke, heh, which underwent phonetic changes in the original words, turned out to be possible in the borrowed words: cedar, hero, scheme, agent, ascetic.
  6. The sequence of vowels and consonants, which is not characteristic of the Russian language, highlights borrowings in which the unfamiliar consonances of parachute, puree, communique, jeep, jury are transmitted by means of the Russian phonetic system.
  7. A special phonetic feature of words of Turkic origin is vowel harmony (vowel harmonism) - the regular use of only one row of vowels in one word: back [a], [y] or front [e], [i]: ataman, caravan, pencil, shoe, lasso , chest, sundress, drum, heel, sash, ulus, mosque, beads.

Among the morphological features of borrowed words, the most characteristic is their immutability, the absence of inflections. So, some foreign language nouns do not change by case, do not have correlative singular and plural forms: taxi, coffee, coat, beige, mini, maxi.

The word-building signs of borrowings include foreign prefixes: interval, deduction, individualism, regression, archimandrite, rear-admiral, antichrist and suffixes: dean's office, student, technical school, editor, literature, proletariat, populism, socialist, polemize, etc.

Tracing

One of the methods of borrowing is tracing, i.e., building lexical units on the model of the corresponding words of a foreign language by accurately translating their significant parts or borrowing individual meanings of words. Accordingly, lexical and semantic tracings are distinguished

Lexical calques arise as a result of a literal translation into Russian of a foreign word in parts: a prefix, a root, a suffix with an exact repetition of the method of its formation and meaning. For example, the Russian word look is formed according to the German model aussehen as a result of tracing the prefix you = German aus-; verb stem – to look = German sehen. The words hydrogen and oxygen are tracing papers of the Greek hudor - "water" + genos - "kind" and oxys - "sour" + genos - "kind"; likewise the German Halbinsel served as the model for the peninsula tracing paper; the English sky-scraper in Russian has a tracing-paper skyscraper (cf. Ukrainian hmaroches). The following borrowings came to us through tracing: biography (gr. bios + grapho), superman (German über + Mensch); welfare (fr. bien+ktre), spelling (gr. orthos+grapho) and many others. Such tracing papers are also called derivational, more precisely lexical and derivational.

Semantic papers are original words that, in addition to their inherent meanings in the Russian lexical system, acquire new meanings under the influence of another language. For example, the Russian word picture, which means “work of painting”, “spectacle”, under the influence of the English language, was also used in the meaning of “film”. This is a tracing paper of the English polysemantic word picture, which has the following meanings in the source language: “picture”, “drawing”, “portrait”, “movie”, “shooting frame”.

Many semantic cripples from the French language were introduced by N. M. Karamzin: touch, touching, taste, refined, image, etc. Appeal to them at the beginning of the 19th century. was a distinctive feature of the "new style" developed by the Karamzin school and approved by Pushkin and his associates.

Lexical-derivative calquing was used when replenishing the Russian lexicon from Greek, Latin, German, French sources.

Another kind of borrowings are lexical half-calques - words that combine word-for-word translated foreign and Russian word-building elements. For example, the word humanity has the Latin root human-us, but the Russian suffix -ost is added to it (cf. humanism), or the Greek (tele) and Russian (vision-e) bases are combined in the compound word television.

Relation to borrowed words

In relation to borrowed words, two extremes often collide: on the one hand, a glut of speech with foreign words and phrases, on the other hand, their denial, the desire to use only the original word. At the same time, in polemics, they often forget that many borrowings have become completely Russified and have no equivalents, being the only names for the corresponding realities (remember Pushkin's: But pantaloons, tailcoat, vest - all these words are not in Russian ...). The lack of a scientific approach to the problem of mastering foreign language vocabulary is also manifested in the fact that its use is sometimes considered in isolation from the functional and stylistic consolidation of language means: it is not taken into account that in some cases the appeal to foreign book words is not stylistically justified, while in others it is necessary, since these words are an integral part of the vocabulary assigned to a certain style serving a particular area of ​​communication.

In different periods of the development of the Russian literary language, the assessment of the penetration of foreign language elements into it was ambiguous. In addition, with the activation of the process of lexical borrowing, the opposition to it usually intensifies. So, Peter I demanded from his contemporaries to write "as intelligibly as possible", without abusing non-Russian words. M.V. Lomonosov in his "theory of three calms", highlighting the words of various groups in the Russian vocabulary, did not leave room for borrowings from non-Slavic languages. And creating Russian scientific terminology, Lomonosov consistently sought to find equivalents in the language to replace foreign terms, sometimes artificially transferring such formations into the language of science. Both A.P. Sumarokov and N.I. Novikov opposed the clogging of the Russian language with French words that were fashionable at that time.

However, in the XIX century. the emphasis has shifted. Representatives of the Karamzin school, young poets led by Pushkin, had to fight for the use of lexical borrowings on Russian soil, since they reflected the advanced ideas of the French Enlightenment. It is no coincidence that tsarist censorship eradicated from the language such borrowed words as revolution, progress.

In the first years of Soviet power, the most urgent cultural and educational task was to familiarize the broad masses of the people with knowledge, to eliminate illiteracy. Under these conditions, prominent writers and public figures put forward the demand for the simplicity of the literary language.

In our time, the question of the appropriateness of using borrowings is associated with the assignment of lexical means to certain functional styles of speech. The use of foreign words that have a limited scope of distribution can be justified by the circle of readers, the stylistic affiliation of the work. Foreign terminological vocabulary is an indispensable means of concise and accurate transmission of information in texts intended for narrow specialists, but it can also be an insurmountable barrier to understanding a popular science text by an unprepared reader.

One should also take into account the tendency emerging in our age of scientific and technological progress towards the creation of international terminology, common names for concepts, phenomena of modern science, production, which also contributes to the consolidation of borrowed words that have acquired an international character.

Questions for self-examination

  1. What explains the replenishment of Russian vocabulary with foreign words?
  2. What are the ways of penetration of lexical borrowings into the Russian language?
  3. What lexical layers are distinguished in the Russian language depending on the origin of words?
  4. What place do Old Slavonic words occupy in Russian vocabulary?
  5. How are foreign words mastered by the Russian language?
  6. By what phonetic and morphological signs can borrowed words be distinguished from the composition of the Russian vocabulary?
  7. What are calques?
  8. What types of cripples in Russian do you know?
  9. What are the criteria for the use of foreign words in speech?

Exercises

24. Analyze the composition of the vocabulary in the text in terms of its origin. Highlight foreign words, noting the degree of their assimilation by the Russian language. Specify Old Slavonicisms. For reference, refer to etymological dictionaries and dictionaries of foreign words.

The southern facade of the Saltykovs' house faces the Field of Mars. Before the revolution, the present growing park was a huge square where parades of the troops of the Guards Corps took place. Behind it was the gloomy Engineering Castle with its gilded spire. Now the building is covered with old trees. In Pushkin's time they were only ten or three years old.

The façade of the embassy's mansion had not yet been damaged by the later addition of the fourth floor.

Eight windows of the ambassador's former apartment overlook the Champ de Mars, one of which is blocked; the extreme windows on the right and left are triple. In the middle of the floor, a glass door leads to a balcony, designed in strict proportions of the Alexander Empire style. Its massive cast-iron grate is very beautiful. The balcony was probably erected in 1819 at the same time as the entire third floor from the side of the Champ de Mars. ...Arriving in Leningrad, I asked permission to inspect the southern part of the third floor of the Institute of Culture.

Now here, basically, his library is placed. Book riches (at present more than three hundred thousand volumes) are already cramped in the enfilade of the former rooms of Countess Dolly ...

The five apartments overlooking the Champ de Mars are bright and invariably warm rooms. And in the most severe frosts it is never fresh here. The Countess's favorite camellias and her other flowers probably did well in these rooms even in the cloudy St. Petersburg winters. Darya Fyodorovna was also comfortable there, who, as we know, in some respects herself resembled a hothouse flower.

In real terms, the countess, having lived for many years in Italy, at least in the first years after her arrival in St. Petersburg, could hardly endure domestic frosts. The very arrival of the northern winter oppressed her.

Having settled in the Saltykovs’ house, she writes down on October 1 of the same 1829: “Today the first snow fell - the winter, which will last for seven months with us, made my heart shrink: the influence of the north must be very strong on the mood of a person, because among such a happy existence like mine, I have to struggle with my sadness and melancholy all the time. I reproach myself for this, but I can’t do anything about it - beautiful Italy is to blame for this, joyful, sparkling, warm, which turned my first youth into a picture full of colors, comfort and harmony. She has thrown, as it were, a veil over the rest of my life, which will pass outside of her! Few people would understand me in this regard - but only a person brought up and developed in the south truly feels what life is and knows all its charm.

There are no words, the young ambassador, like a few, knew how to feel and love life. I only felt it - let's repeat - one-sidedly. So it was before, in Italy, and in the red living room of the Saltykovsky house, where, probably, she filled out the pages of her diary ... But it is difficult to walk through her former private rooms without excitement. Probably, they are no less than the front apartments of the embassy, ​​they were what has long been called the “salon of the Countess Ficquelmont”, where, according to P.A. Vyazemsky, "both the diplomats and Pushkin were at home."

(N. Raevsky.)

25. In sentences from the works of A. S. Pushkin, highlight Old Slavonicisms. Indicate their stylistic functions, name, where possible, Russian correspondences.

1. Leaning on an alien plow, submitting to scourges, here lean slavery drags along the reins of an inexorable owner. Here everyone drags a heavy yoke to the grave, not daring to feed hopes and inclinations in the soul, here young virgins bloom for the whim of an insensitive villain. 2. Fear, O army of foreigners! Russia's sons moved; both old and young arose; they fly at the bold, their hearts are kindled with vengeance. 3. I love rabid youth ... 4. ... There, under the shadow of the wings, my young days rushed by. 5. Listen to my sad voice ... 6. I did not want to kiss the lips of the young Armides with such torment, or roses of fiery cheeks, or Persians full of languor ... 7. It's time to leave the boring shore ... 8. ... Fields ! I am devoted to you in soul. 9. But thank God! you are alive, unharmed... 10. Hello, young, unfamiliar tribe! 11. And I always considered you a faithful, brave knight... 12. I opened granaries for them, I scattered gold for them, I found work for them... 13. Neither power nor life amuse me... 14. Then - is not it? - in the desert, far from the vain rumors, you did not like me ... 15. I listened and listened - involuntary and sweet tears flowed.

The origin of Russian vocabulary.

The composition of the vocabulary (original / borrowed); composition of Russian vocabulary; borrowings, mastery of borrowed vocabulary.

All words in the Russian language can be divided into two large classes in terms of their origin: native, originally inherent in the Russian language, and foreign, i.e. borrowed by Russian from other languages. The boundaries between these two classes of words cannot always be established precisely: some words came into our language so long ago that it is already difficult to distinguish them from the original ones. Such, for example, is the word bread, borrowed from ancient German, or the Greek words: cucumber, doll, bath.

native Russian words

What words are native Russian (common Slavic)? Common Slavic vocabulary is an extensive and diverse layer of words. These are, for example: 1) the names of parts of the human body and the body of animals: head, lip, horn, heart, throat and etc.; 2) names of time intervals: day, evening, day, autumn, hour, century, month and etc.; 3) words denoting phenomena and objects of nature: storm, rain, whirlwind, frost, stone lake, river, forest and etc.; 4) names of plants: beech, birch, willow, linden, carrot, walnut, pumpkin, plum and etc.; 5) domestic and wild animals: bull, ox, dog, crow, hare, snake, fish, and etc.; 6) names of tools and objects of labor: oar, bucket, knife, awl and etc.; 7) some abstract names: faith, will, guilt, mercy, death, work, honor and some others; 8) names of actions: lie down, wash suck, want etc., 9) property names: wise, cunning, warm and etc.; 10) designation of place and time: where, yesterday, past and etc.; 11) most non-derivative prepositions: in, to, for, from, to, oh, at and etc.; 12) unions and, ah, but, yes, or etc.

Borrowings in the Russian dictionary

1. Reasons for borrowing

External reasons for borrowing

1. The main external reason is the borrowing of a word along with the borrowing of a thing or concept. For example, with the advent of such realities as car, conveyor, radio, cinema, TV, laser and many others, their names have also entered the Russian language. Most borrowings are associated with the development of science, technology, culture, economics, and industrial relations. Many of these words are firmly established in life, and then lose their novelty and move into an active vocabulary. Yes, in the 1950s and 1970s. 20th century a large number of terms related to the development of astronautics have appeared: cosmonaut, cosmodrome, space vision, telemetry, spacecraft and others. Today, all these words have become common.

2. Another external reason for borrowing is the designation of some special type of objects with the help of a foreign word. For example, to designate a servant in a hotel in Russian, the French became stronger. word porter, to designate a special kind of jam (in the form of a thick homogeneous mass) - English. jam. The need for specialization of objects and concepts leads to the borrowing of scientific and technical terms, many of which have Russian counterparts: English. relevant - rus. essential; lat. local - rus. local; lat. transformer - rus. converter; lat. compression - rus. compression; French to pilot - rus. manage etc.

Internal reasons for borrowing

1. The tendency to replace the descriptive name with one-word ones. For example: a sniper - instead of a marksman, a tour - instead of traveling along a circular route, a motel - instead of a hotel for autotourists, a sprint - instead of sprinting, etc.

2. Strengthening in the language of borrowed words with a certain morphological structure (in this case, the borrowing of a new foreign word is greatly facilitated). So, in the XIX century. Russian borrowed from English the gentleman and the policeman. At the end of XIX - beginning of XX century. an athlete, a record holder, a yachtsman (persons of importance and a common element - men) were added to them. Today, such words make up a fairly significant group: businessman, congressman, crossman, etc.

3. Influence of foreign culture, fashion for foreign words. These are the words exclusive, price list, charisma, security, teenager and many others.

2. Layers of foreign vocabulary in modern Russian

Borrowings from Slavic languages

Among the words borrowed by the Russian language, the layer of Old Slavonicisms is especially significant - words that entered the Old Russian language from the related Old Slavonic (or Church Slavonic) language. The Old Church Slavonic language, created in the 9th century, was the language of worship and church books; it became the first book-written language of the Slavs. Old Slavonicisms can be recognized by the following signs:

a) combinations of ra, la, re, le in the root or prefix with the original Russian combinations oro, olo, ere, olo, for example: grad - rus. city, country - Russian. side, cold - rus. cold;

b) a combination of zhd in accordance with the original Russian zh: alien - rus. alien, clothes - now Russian. vernacular-dialect clothing;

c) the consonant sound u in accordance with the original Russian h: illumination - Rus. candle, burning - rus. hot, power - rus. be able;

d) initial e with native Russian o: single, unit, single - Rus. one, spring - ryc. autumn.

Words from closely related Slavic languages ​​also came to Russian. From Ukrainian, for example, the names of household items were borrowed: borscht, dumplings, dumplings, hopak. A lot of words came to us from the Polish language: town, monogram, harness, zrazy, gentry.

Borrowings from non-Slavic languages

In different eras, starting from the 8th century. foreign words were borrowed into the Russian language, which was clearly reflected in its history. Scandinavian (Norwegian, Swedish): anchor, hook, hook etc. Finno-Ugric: salmon, herring, shark, herring; tundra, blizzard, dumplings etc. Germanic (Danish, Dutch, Icelandic, etc.): sword, shell, cauldron, prince, boron, camel and others. Turkic (languages ​​of the Polovtsians, Pechenegs, Khazars): iron, money, heel, treasury, guard, shackles etc. Greek: cherry, lantern, mathematics, philosophy, icon, gospel, monk, monastery and many others. other Latin: student, audience, republic, revolution, constitution and many others. other German: sandwich, hat, package; accountant, promissory note, share, interest and others. Foreign borrowings should include not only individual words, but also some word-forming elements: Greek prefixes a-, anti-, archi-, pan-: immoral, anti-perestroika, arch-absurd, pan-German; Latin prefixes de-, counter-, trans-, ultra-, inter-: degradation, counter-play, trans-European, ultra-left, intervocalic; Latin suffixes -ism, -ist, -or, -tor, etc.: tailism, harmonist, combinator. Such prefixes and suffixes have gained international distribution.

3. Types of borrowed vocabulary

All foreign vocabulary used in the Russian language can be divided into two groups: I. Mastered borrowings; II. Unused borrowings: 1) exoticisms; 2) foreign inclusions, 3) internationalisms. Mastered- these are borrowings that came into the Russian language a very long time ago and are no longer perceived as foreign. Such words as notebook, student and many others have become "ours" for us. etc. There are also borrowings that have not been mastered by the Russian language, which stand out sharply against the background of Russian vocabulary. A special place among them is occupied by exoticisms- words that characterize the specific features of the life of different peoples and are used in describing non-Russian reality. So, when depicting the life of the peoples of the Caucasus, the words aul, saklya, dzhigit, arba, etc. are used. in our, but also in other languages.The use of some of them has a long tradition, for example, Alma Mater (lat. "nursing mother" - the name of the native university).

4. Linguistic features of borrowed words

Among the phonetic features of borrowed words, the following can be distinguished.

1. Unlike native Russian words that never begin with the sound [a] (which would be contrary to the phonetic laws of the Russian language), borrowed words have an initial a: questionnaire, abbot, paragraph, aria, attack, lampshade, arba, angel, anathema .

2. The initial e distinguishes mainly Greekisms and Latinisms (Russian words never begin with this sound): epoch, era, ethics, exam, execution, effect, floor.

3. The letter f also testifies to the non-Russian source of the word, since the Eastern Slavs did not have the sound [f] and the corresponding graphic sign was used only to designate it in borrowed words: forum, fact, lantern, sofa, film, scam, form, aphorism, broadcast, profile, etc.

4. The combination of two or more vowels in a word was unacceptable according to the laws of Russian phonetics, so borrowed words are easily distinguished by this feature: poet, halo, out, theater, veil, cocoa, radio, punctuation.

5. A special phonetic feature of words of Turkic origin is the harmony of identical vowels: ataman, caravan, pencil, shoe, chest, sundress, drum, mosque.

Among the morphological features of borrowed words, the most characteristic is their immutability. So, some foreign language nouns do not change by case, do not have correlative forms of the singular and plural: taxi, coffee, coat, beige, mini, maxi, etc.

The vocabulary of the Russian language is one of the largest in the world. It has been formed over the centuries under the influence of the development of social, economic and cultural life. The list of native Russian words makes up 90% of modern explanatory dictionaries. The rest consists of foreign borrowings that appeared both in the early stages of its development and in modern times.

In contact with

Stages of development of the Russian vocabulary

Russian language, along with Ukrainian and Belarusian, is part of the East Slavic group of the Indo-European language family. It began to form at the end of the Neolithic era and continues its development to this day.

There are several major stages in the development of native vocabulary:

Words that appeared in our language at any of these stages are considered native Russian.

Also, words of Russian origin include lexical units formed from borrowed ones according to the rules of Russian word formation.

Scientists believe that at the end of the Neolithic era there was a single Indo-European linguistic community. Native speakers of the Indo-European language lived on a rather vast territory. Some researchers call this place the land from the Yenisei to the Volga. Their opponents talk about the settlement of the Indo-Europeans along the banks of the Danube and on the Balkan Peninsula. But they all agree that the Indo-European language gave rise to almost all European languages ​​and some Asian ones.

Common Indo-European words reflect specific phenomena and objects of the surrounding reality, degrees of kinship, numerals. Their spelling and pronunciation in many languages ​​of the Indo-European family is almost identical. For example:

In East Slavic languages there are a lot of words common to Indo-European languages. These include nouns denoting:

  • degree of relationship: mother, brother, sister, daughter, son;
  • natural phenomena: sun, moon, ice, rain, water;
  • animals: wolf, goose, cow, bear;
  • plants: oak, birch;
  • metals: copper, bronze.

Words denoting numerals (two, three, four, five), properties of objects (new, white, fast), actions (sew, go) have Indo-European origin.

Common Slavic

Around the 6th century BC e. the Proto-Slavic language appeared. Its carriers were Slavic tribes settled in the territory between the rivers Dnieper, Vistula, Bug. Common Slavic vocabulary served as the basis for the development of the languages ​​of the Western, Southern and Eastern Slavs. Common roots can be traced in them today.

The common Slavic primordially Russian vocabulary is diverse. Noun examples:

Among common Slavic words there are nouns that denote not specific objects and phenomena, but abstract concepts. These include: will, guilt, faith, sin, thought, glory, happiness, goodness.

Compared with the words of Indo-European origin, there are more lexical units from the common Slavic vocabulary in our language, denoting actions, signs and qualities of objects.

  • Actions: breathe, lie down, run, write, sow, reap, weave, spin.
  • Signs and qualities of objects: high, fast, black, red, many, few, soon.

Common Slavisms are distinguished by their simple structure. They consist of a base and an end. At the same time, the number of derivative words from their stems is very large. Several dozen words have been formed with the root of glory: dishonor, glorify, glorify, glorious, love of glory, glorify.

The meaning of some common Slavic words changed during the development of the language. The word "red" in the common Slavic vocabulary was used in the meaning of "beautiful, good." The modern meaning (color designation) has come into use since the 16th century.

There are about two thousand common Slavic words in the vocabulary of Russian-speaking people. This relatively small group of native words forms the core of the Russian written and spoken language.

Old Russian or East Slavic stage of lexical development

In the 7th century AD, on the basis of the common Slavic vocabulary, three separate groups of Slavic languages ​​began to develop: West Slavic, South Slavic and East Slavic languages. The East Slavic community of peoples became the basis of the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalities. The tribes that were carriers of a single East Slavic language formed a single state in the 9th century - Kievan (Ancient) Rus. For this reason, the vocabulary that appeared between VII and XIV is called Old Russian vocabulary.

Old Russian lexical units were formed under the influence of the political, economic, social and cultural development of a single East Slavic state. The original words of our language of this period belong to different parts of speech and lexical-semantic groups.

Great Russian period of language formation

From the 14th century the actual Russian or Great Russian stage of development of our vocabulary begins. It continues to this day. The beginning of the formation of the Great Russian vocabulary coincided with the formation of the Russian statehood and the division for a long time of the development of the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalities. Therefore, in the lexical stock of these languages, the same objects are denoted by different words. For example: wallet - ukr. hamanets - Belarusian. cough; palace - Ukrainian Palace - Belarusian. palace; sparkle - Ukrainian vibliskuvati - Belarusian. zihatsets.

The words that appeared during this period are characterized by a derivative basis. They appeared on the basis of well-known lexical units of Indo-European, Common Slavic and East Slavic origin. New word forms were formed on the basis of borrowings from foreign languages ​​by adding simple bases. Such word forms are considered primordial. Actually Russian words make up a significant part of the Russian vocabulary.

Formation of new words in Russian

The vocabulary of our language replenishes quite rapidly. The basis for this process is the lexical units of the previous stages of language development and borrowed vocabulary. This vocabulary changes and adapts to the needs of the language in accordance with the rules of word formation adopted in it.

Nouns

Addition to the borrowed basis of a specific Russian suffix -shchik, -chik, -ovshchik, -shchik, -lk, -ovk, -k, -tel, -ost. For example: from the word stone, which is of Indo-European origin, with the help of the suffix -shchik, the actual Russian noun mason was formed; from the word sheet, which appeared in the all-Slavic period of the development of the Russian language, with the help of the suffix -ovk, the concept of a leaflet arose.

Addition to the basis of primordially Russian prefixes at-, pa-, pr-, su-, in-, voz-, on-, ob-, pre-, re- and so on. For example: by adding the prefix city to the common Slavic stem, the word suburb is formed; adding the prefixes o- to the same stem, they get the noun garden.

The formation of new words from two or more bases: from the common Slavic bases -pravd- and -lyub- the complex Russian word truth-lover was formed; from the Indo-European basis of the mouse- and the common Slavic word to catch with the help of the suffix -k, the noun mysh was formed Ways of forming verbs.

Ways of forming verbs

One of the most common ways to form verbs is simultaneous addition of a prefix and a suffix to the stem. For example: from the common Slavic basis, running with the help of the prefix raz- and suffixes -at and -sya appeared the verb to scatter; from the common Slavic basis -bogat- with the help of the prefix o- and suffixes -it and -sya, the original Russian word enriched itself appeared.

In the actual Russian period of the development of vocabulary, verbs formed from nouns are quite common. From the borrowed in the XVIII German word assault with the help of the suffix -ova, the verb to assault was formed. With the help of the suffix -i, the verb to praise was formed from the common Slavic word glory.

The Russian vocabulary is one of the most extensive and actively developing in the world. Borrowing vocabulary from other languages ​​and forming new words on its basis, the Russian language is replenished. Using online dictionaries of the origin of words, you can get acquainted with the etymology of Russian vocabulary in more detail. In the age of globalization, knowledge of the origins of the Russian language and the stages of its development will help preserve its originality and uniqueness.