Russian language is known for its lexicalwealth. According to the "Big Academic Dictionary" in 17 volumes, it has more than 130,000 words. Some of them are originally Russian, while others were borrowed from different languages in different time periods. Borrowed vocabulary is a significant part of the dictionary of the Russian language.
Origin of words
Russian language belongs to the East Slavic familylanguages. In linguistics there is a perception that initially there was a single Indo-European language. It became the basis for the formation of a pan-Slavic or Pra-Slavic, from which the Russian later emerged.
Further, under the influence of social and cultural factors, new words began to penetrate the vocabulary, which came to us from a number of languages. It is customary to single out native Russian and borrowed vocabulary.
Original layer
The original vocabulary includes Indo-European and Common Slavonic lexemes, as well as the East Slavic layer and words, called the proper Russian.
Indo-European layer
Indo-European words were in language even before the collapse of the ethnic Indo-European community, which occurred around the end of the Neolithic.
Indo-European lexemes include:
- Words indicating the degree of kinship: "mother", "daughter", "father", "brother".
- Names of animals: "sheep", "pig", "bull".
- Plants: "willow".
- Food: "bone", "meat".
- Action: "take", "lead", "see", "tell".
- Qualities: "old", "barefoot".
Common Slavic layer
Pan-Slavic vocabulary was formed before the VI. n e. These words were inherited from the Slavic language of captives who lived in the area between the upper reaches of the Western Bug, Vistula and Dnieper rivers.
This includes:
- Names of plants and grasses: "oak", "linden", "maple", "ash", "rowan", "branch", "pine", "bark", "bitches".
- Cultivated plants: "barley", "millet", "spruce", "pea", "wheat", "poppy".
- The names of housing and its components: "house", "floor", "shelter", "canopy".
- Food: "cheese", "lard", "kvass", "jelly".
- Names of birds (both forest and domestic): “rooster”, “goose”, “crow”, “sparrow”, “nightingale”, “starling”.
- The name of the tools and processes: "weave", "sech", "shuttle", "hoe".
- Action: "wander", "share", "mumble."
- Temporary concepts: "spring", "winter", "evening".
- Qualities: "near", "cheerful", "evil", "gentle", "pale", "silent".
According to N. M. Shansky, they occupy about a quarter of the words we use most in everyday life and are the core of the Russian language.
Old Russian vocabulary
To Old Russian or East Slavic layerVocabulary refers to words that originated in the language of the Eastern Slavs in the 6th – 7th centuries. These are the words included in the Ukrainian and Belarusian languages - those tribes that then formed Kievan Rus.
This includes words to indicate:
- Properties and qualities of objects and actions: "good", "gray", "rumble", "dark", "keen-eyed", "blond", "dense", "cheap".
- Action: "fidget", "shiver", "excuse", "flutter", "boil".
- Designations of kinship: "uncle", "nephew", "stepdaughter".
- Household concepts: "graveyard", "rope", "basket", "samovar", "twine".
- The names of some birds and animals: "squirrel", "bullfinch", "cat", "marten", "jackdaw", "chaffinch", "viper".
- Verbal designations of numbers: "ninety, forty."
- Tokens to denote time intervals and concepts: "now", "today", "after".
Actually Russian words
The words that came into use after the formation of the language of the Great Russian people, that is, from the XIV century, and then Russian in the XVII century, refer to the actual Russian words.
These include:
- Names of household items: "wallpaper", "top", "fork".
- Products: "jam", "tortilla", "Kulebyaka", "cabbage rolls".
- Natural phenomena: "blizzard", "bad weather", "ice", "swell".
- Plants and fruits: Antonovka, shrub.
- Representatives of the animal world: "Rook", "desman", "chicken".
- Action: "influence", "uproot", "razderzhivat", "loom", "coo", "perekat".
- Signs: "convex", "flabby", "painstaking", "seriously", "glimpse", "waking."
- The name of abstract concepts: "deception", "damage", "experience", "tidiness", "caution".
One and the signs of the actual Russian words - the presence of the suffixes "-ost" and "-stvo".
Borrowing
Borrowed vocabulary is divided into two large groups:
- Words from the Slavic, related languages.
- Tokens from non-Slavic languages.
Foreign words firmly embedded in vocabularyRussian language due to cultural and political ties, trade and military relations with other states. In a number of cases they assimilated, that is, they adapted to the norms of the literary language and became commonly used. Some of them have become so firmly established in our vocabulary that we cannot even imagine that they really are not originally Russian.
True, the borrowings were bilateral - other languages also enriched the vocabulary with our lexemes.
Church Slavonic vocabulary
Borrowing from Slavic languages occurred in different time periods.
The earliest stratum was the Old Slavic orChurch Slavonic borrowed vocabulary in Russian. It was used by the Slavic peoples as a written literary language for the translation of church books and the spread of Christianity in Slavic countries. It was based on one of the dialects of Old Bulgarian, and its founders consider Cyril and Methodius. In Russia, the Old Slavonic language appeared at the end of the 10th century, when Christianity was adopted. It is then that the rapid development of borrowed vocabulary begins.
Old Slavonic lexemes include:
- Church terms: "priest," "sacrifice," "cross."
- Abstract concepts: "power", "consent", "grace", "virtue".
And many other words: "mouth", "lanita", "finger". You can recognize them by a number of distinctive features.
Signs of Old Slavonic
They distinguish phonetic and morphological signs of Old Slavonic, by which one can quickly calculate borrowed vocabulary.
Phonetic refers to:
- Incomplete voice, that is, the presence in the words "–ra-"or "-la-", "-re-" or "-le" instead of the usual "-or-" and "-olo-", "-re-" and "-ele-" within one morpheme, most often , root. For example: "gate", "gold", "sequence" - "gate", "gold", "turn".
- "Ra-" and "la-", replacing "ro-", "lo-" with which the word begins. For example: "equal" - "smooth", "boat" - "boat".
- The combination of "railway" instead of "g": "walking", "driving."
- "Sh" in place of the Russian "ch". For example: "lighting" - "candle".
- Shock "e" before a hard consonant in the place of Russian "yo" ("o"): "sky" - "palate", "finger" - "thimble".
- “E” at the beginning of words, instead of Russian “o”: “Esen” - “autumn”, “Ezero” - “lake”, “unit” - “one”.
Morphological features:
The prefix "voz-", "from-", "after-", "pre-": "pay tribute", "pour out", "banish", "cast down", "fall", "excessive", "despise", " deliberate".
Suffixes "-st (e)", "-h (s)", "-zn", "-te", "-usch-", "-yushchu-", "-asch-", "-yashchir-" : "prosperity", "trap", "life", "penalty", "battle", "knowledgeable", "lying".
Parts of the complex words "goodness", "godly", "evil", "sacrifice", "one-": "grace", "god-fearing", "malicious", "kindness", "uniformity", "sacrifice ".
Borrowed vocabulary related toOld Slavic has a stylistic tinge of solemnity or elevation. For example, compare words such as "breg" or "shore", "drag" or "drag." Such words are more often found in prose and poetic works and indicate the epoch in question in the work. They can characterize the characters, slipping into their speech.
In some works of the XIX century were used to create irony or satire, humor.
Gifts of Slavic Languages
The most famous are the borrowed words in the vocabulary of the Russian language from Polish, the so-called Polonism, which penetrated into our language around the XVII-XVIII centuries These include:
- Names of housing: "apartment".
- Means of transportation and their parts: "carriage", "goats".
- Household items: "belongings".
- Clothes: "jacket".
- Military terms: "sergeant", "hussar", "colonel", "recruit".
- Actions: "daub", "draw", "shuffle".
- Names of animals and plants, products: "rabbit", "almond", "jam", "fruit".
Such words as “brynza”, “children”, “gopak”, “donut” came from the Ukrainian language into Russian.
Greece
Greek words began to penetrate into the Russian language in the period of pan-Slavic unity. The earliest borrowings include household terms: “cauldron”, “bread”, “bed”, “dish”.
Since the 9th century, after the baptism of Rus, a period of cultural relations between Russia and Byzantium begins, at the same time the lexicon falls into:
- Religious terms and concepts: "angel", "demon", "metropolitan", "archbishop", "icon", "lampada".
- Scientific terms: "philosophy", "history", "mathematics", "grammar".
- A number of everyday concepts: "tub", "lantern", "notebook", "bath".
- The names of the animal and plant world: "cedar", "crocodile", "cypress".
- A number of terms from science and art: "idea", "logic", "anapaest", "trochee", "mantle", "verse".
- Linguistic terminology: "vocabulary" and "lexicology", "antonym" and "homonym", "semantics" and "semasiology".
Latinism
Latin terms are mainly included in the Russian language in the period from the XVI to the XVIII century, significantly replenishing the lexical structure in the field of social, political and scientific and technical terminology.
These are the terms used in most languages: "republic", "proletariat", "revolution", "dictatorship", "meridian", "minimum", "corporation", "laboratory", "process".
Turkism
The following words were borrowed from the Turkic languages (Avar, Pecheneg, Bulgarian, Khazar): "pearl", "jerboa", "idol", "beads", "feather grass".
Most of the Turkism came to us from the Tatar language: "caravan", "mound", "astrakhan", "denga", "treasury", "diamond", "watermelon", "raisin", "stockings", "shoe", "chest", "robe", "noodles".
This also includes the names of the breeds and colors of horses: "chaly", "bay", "brown", "kaur", "argamak".
Scandinavian trail
Relatively small amount in Russianborrowed vocabulary from Scandinavian languages. Basically these are the words denoting household items: “anchor”, “hook”, “chest”, “whip”, and also proper names: Rurik, Oleg, Igor.
German-Romance Relations
Quite a lot of borrowed vocabulary words from German, Dutch, English, Spanish, Italian and French:
- Examples of borrowed German vocabulary can often be heard from the military. These are such words as "corporal", "paramedic", "headquarters", "guardhouse", "junker".
- This also includes the terms of the trade sphere: "bill", "freight", "stamp".
- Concepts from the sphere of art: "landscape", "easel."
- Household vocabulary: "tie", "leggings", "clover", "spinach", "chisel", "workbench".
- During the reign of Peter I, a number of nautical terms from the Dutch language are included in the lexicon: "tack", "flag", "skipper", "sailor", "steering wheel", "fleet", "drift".
- The names of animals, familiar to us items: "raccoon", "umbrella", "hood".
English language gave us words such as "bot", "yacht", "schooner", related to the sea business.
There were also borrowed social, householdconcepts, technical and sports terms: "fight", "meeting", "tunnel", "tender", "comfort", "gin", "grog", "pudding", "football", "hockey", "basketball" , "the finish".
From the middle of the 18th – 19th centuries, borrowing from the French began. This is a newer borrowed vocabulary.
Here it is necessary to highlight the following groups:
- Household items: "medallion", "vest", "coat", "tights", "toilet", "corsage", "veil", "broth", "marmalade", "cutlet".
- A series of words from the field of art: "play", "actor", "director", "entrepreneur".
- Military terminology: "attack", "squadron", "cannonade".
- Political terms: "parliament", "assembly", "exploitation", "demoralization".
From Italian came:
- Musical terms: "aria", "tenor", "sonata", "cavatina".
- The names of food: "pasta", "noodles".
The words “serenade”, “guitar”, “caravel”, “cigar”, “tomato”, “caramel” were borrowed from Spanish.
Today, the use of borrowed vocabulary from Germanic-Romance languages in everyday life is common to us.
Conclusion
Original and borrowed vocabulary make upvocabulary of the Russian language. The formation of a language is a rather long process. During its development, Russian has been added to a number of tokens from various languages. Some borrowings took place so long ago that we cannot even imagine that a well-known word is not originally Russian.
