There is a special term in linguistics."ethno-time", which means the names of people living in a particular area. The question of how to call the inhabitants of certain cities often turns out to be a problem for many speakers of the Russian language. Even in the grammar reference books one can find various variants of pronunciation and spellings, which causes some confusion.
Penza confusion
The population of many is becoming a victim of this phenomenon.cities of Russia. In fact, as the inhabitants of Penza are called? Many linguists discussed this problem, discussing which version is considered grammatically correct, regardless of the number of its carriers. It turns out that in order to find out the name of the inhabitants of Penza, you need to turn to special dictionaries, which are updated regularly. Academic data obtained and verified by linguistic scholars formulate the basic objective rules that govern the peculiarities of the use of "ethno-chronyms".
How is it right after all?
The Dictionary of Residents of Russia also explains twocase of how to call the inhabitants of Penza. The allowance allows you to call a resident or resident of the city Penza or Penza, but also Penza and Penza, respectively. However, the dictionary does not focus on any particular use case, allowing both to be used in speech. In turn, some experts insist that the variation of “Penza” is more literary and stylistically more restrained, therefore those who live in Penza should be called that way.
The voice of the people
In reality, with the concept of what is calledPenza residents, there are some disagreements and contradictions. Say, the name "Penza" originated in the language in the seventeenth century. Despite the vocabulary norms, many Penza residents insist on the Penzens variant, since the second method seems to them to be somewhat slang, insulting and colloquial. At the same time, there is another point of view, according to which the word "Penza" (entered into the speech in the last third of the 20th century) seems to be too officious, pathetic and gives "Soviet". Apparently, native speakers will not be able to come to a consensus, and adjustments to the dictionary entries will not be made.
What will happen to Penza / Penzyak in the future?
Russian language is a unique system and constantlychanging. Often, the speech norms are not governed by the rules and restrictions set by linguists, but by the daily practice of using certain structures. That is why it is extremely difficult to influence the situation, legislatively, approving a certain form relating to a resident (resident) of Penza.
Anyway, the promotion of literate treatmentto the inhabitants of the city is necessary in order to prevent semantic splitting. However, those for whom Penza is a small home, have less difficulty than, for example, the inhabitants of Vladivostok, Torzhok or Krivoi Rog. It remains to hope that in the near future, speakers of the Russian language will stop asking questions about the name of the inhabitants of Penza.