The Russian language is known for its lexical richness. According to the "Big Academic Dictionary" in 17 volumes, it contains more than 130,000 words. Some of them are native Russian, while others were borrowed in different time periods from different languages. Borrowed vocabulary makes up a significant part of the Russian vocabulary.
Origin of words
Russian belongs to the East Slavic family of languages. In linguistics, there is an opinion that initially there was a single Indo-European language. It became the basis for the formation of the pan-Slavic or Proto-Slavic, from which Russian emerged later.
Further, under the influence of social and cultural factors, new words began to penetrate into the vocabulary, which came to us from a number of languages. It is customary to single out native Russian and borrowed vocabulary.
Primordial Formation
The original vocabulary includes Indo-European and common Slavic lexemes, as well as the East Slavic layer and words called proper Russian.
Indo-European layer
Indo-European words were in the 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 relationship: "mother", "daughter", "father", "brother".
- Animal names: "sheep", "pig", "ox".
- Plants: "willow".
- Food: "bone", "meat".
- Actions: "take", "lead", "see", "order".
- Qualities: "dilapidated", "barefoot".
Common Slavic layer
Common Slavic vocabulary was formed before the VI century. n. e. These words were inherited from the language of the Slavic captives, who lived in the territory between the upper reaches of the Western Bug, Vistula and Dnieper rivers.
It includes:
- Names of plants and cereals: "oak", "linden", "maple", "ash", "rowan", "branch", "pine", "bark", "bough".
- Cultural plants: "barley", "millet", "spruce", "pea", "wheat", "poppy".
- Names of housing and its components: "house", "floor", "shelter", "canopy".
- Foodstuffs: "cheese", "lard", "kvass", "jelly".
- Names of birds (both forest and domestic): "rooster","goose", "crow", "sparrow", "nightingale", "starling".
- Names of tools and processes: "weave", "cut", "shuttle", "hoe".
- Actions: "wander", "share", "mumble".
- Temporary concepts: "spring", "winter", "evening".
- Qualities: "neighbor", "cheerful", "evil", "affectionate", "pale", "dumb".
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
The Old Russian or East Slavic layer of vocabulary includes words that arose 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 later formed Kievan Rus.
This includes words to denote:
- Properties and qualities of objects and actions: "good", "gray", "rumble", "dark", "sighted", "blond", "dense", "cheap".
- Actions: "fidget", "chill", "excuse", "sway", "boil".
- Designations of family ties: "uncle", "nephew", "stepdaughter".
- Everyday concepts: "graveyard","rope", "bast basket", "samovar", "string".
- Names of some birds and animals: squirrel, bullfinch, cat, marten, jackdaw, finch, viper.
- Verbal designations of numbers: "ninety, forty".
- Tokens for denoting time periods and concepts: "now", "today", "after".
Actual Russian words
Properly Russian words include words that came into use after the language of the Great Russian people was formed, that is, from the 14th century, and then Russian in the 17th century.
These include:
- Names of household items: "wallpaper", "top", "fork".
- Products: "jam", "cake", "kulebyaka", "stuffed cabbage".
- Phenomena of nature: "blizzard", "bad weather", "icy ice", "swell".
- Plants and fruits: "Antonovka", "shrub".
- Representatives of the animal world: "rook", "desman", "chicken".
- Actions: "influence", "uproot", "rare", "loom", "coo", "blame".
- Signs: "bulging", "flabby", "painstaking", "seriously", "quickly", "in reality".
- Names of abstract concepts: "deception", "damage","experience", "tidiness", "caution".
One of the signs of actually Russian words is the presence of suffixes "-ost" and "-stvo".
Borrowings
Borrowed vocabulary is divided into two large groups:
- Words from related Slavic languages.
- Tokens from non-Slavic languages.
Foreign words have firmly entered the vocabulary of the Russian 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 are so firmly ingrained in our lexicon that we cannot even imagine that they are not actually native Russians.
True, the borrowings were two-way - other languages also replenished the vocabulary with our lexemes.
Church Slavonic vocabulary
Borrowings from Slavic languages occurred in different time periods.
The earliest layer was Old Church Slavonic or Church Slavonic borrowed vocabulary in Russian. It was used by the Slavic peoples as a written literary language for translating church books and spreading Christianity in the Slavic countries. It was based on one of the dialects of Old Bulgarian, and Cyril and Methodius are considered its creators. In Russia, the Old Slavonic language appeared at the end of the 10th century, when Christianity was adopted. That's when it startsrapid development of borrowed vocabulary.
Old Church Slavonic lexemes include:
- Church terms: "priest", "sacrifice", "cross".
- Abstract concepts: "power", "consent", "grace", "virtue".
And many other words: "mouth", "cheeks", "finger". You can recognize them by a number of distinguishing features.
Signs of Old Church Slavism
They highlight the phonetic and morphological features of Old Church Slavonicisms, by which you 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 "-oro-" and "-olo-", " -here-" and "-barely-" within the same morpheme, most often, the root. For example: "gate", "gold", "string" - "gate", "gold", "queue".
- "Ra-" and "la-", replacing "ro-", "lo-" with which the word begins. For example: "equal" - "smooth", "rook" - "boat".
- The combination of "zhd" instead of "zh": "walking", "driving".
- "Щ" in place of the Russian "h". For example: "lighting" - "candle".
- Stressed "e" before a hard consonant in place of the Russian "e" ("o"): "heaven" -"sky", "finger" - "thimble".
- "E" at the beginning of words, instead of Russian "o": "esen" - "autumn", "ezero" - "lake", "unit" - "one".
Morphological features:
Prefix "up-", "from-", "through-", "pre-": "repay", "pour out", "cast out", "overthrow", "fall down", "excessive", "despise", "deliberate".
Suffixes "–stvi(e)", "-h(s)", "-zn", "-te", "-usch-", "-yusch-", "-ash-", "-box-": "prosperity", "stalker", "life", "execution", "battle", "knowledgeable", "lying".
Parts of compound words "good-", "god-", "evil-", "sacrifice-", "one-": "grace", "God-fearing", "malice", "good-loving", " uniformity", "sacrifice".
The borrowed vocabulary related to Old Slavonicism has a stylistic connotation of solemnity or elation. For example, compare words such as "shore" or "shore", "drag" or "drag". Such words are more common in prose and poetry and indicate the era in question.work. They can characterize the characters by slipping into their speech.
In some works of the 19th century, they were used to create irony or satire, humor.
Gifts of the Slavic languages
The most famous borrowed words in the vocabulary of the Russian language from Polish, the so-called Polonisms, penetrated into our language around the 17th-18th centuries. These include:
- Housing names: "apartment".
- Vehicles and their parts: "carriage", "goats".
- Household items: "belongings".
- Clothes: "jacket".
- Military terms: "wahmister", "hussar", "colonel", "recruit".
- Actions: "paint", "draw", "shuffle".
- Names of animals and plants, products: "rabbit", "almond", "jam", "fruit".
Words such as "brynza", "children", "hopak", "bagel" came from the Ukrainian language to Russian.
Grezisms
Greek words began to penetrate the Russian language during the period of common Slavic unity. The earliest borrowings include household terms: "cauldron", "bread", "bed", "dish".
From the 9th century, after the baptism of Russia, the period of cultural relations between Russia and Byzantium begins, at the same time they enter the lexicon:
- Religious terms and concepts:"angel", "demon", "metropolitan", "archbishop", "icon", "lamp".
- Scientific terms: "philosophy", "history", "mathematics", "grammar".
- A number of everyday concepts: "tub", "lantern", "notebook", "bath".
- Names of flora and fauna: "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".
Latinisms
Latin terms mainly entered the Russian language in the period from the 16th to the 18th centuries, significantly replenishing the lexical composition in the field of social, political and scientific and technical terminology.
These are terms used in most languages: "republic", "proletariat", "revolution", "dictatorship", "meridian", "minimum", "corporation", "laboratory", "process".
Turkisms
From the Turkic languages (Avar, Pecheneg, Bulgar, Khazar) the following words were borrowed: "pearl", "jerboa", "idol", "beads", "feather grass".
Most of the Turkisms came to us from the Tatar language: "caravan", "mound", "karakul", "money", "treasury", "diamond", "watermelon", "raisin", "stocking", "shoe", "chest", "robe", "noodles".
This also includes the names of breeds and colors of horses: "roan", "bay", "brown", "brown", "argamak".
Scandinavian trace
A relatively small amount of Russian borrowed vocabulary from the Scandinavian languages. Basically, these are words denoting household items: "anchor", "hook", "chest", "whip", as well as proper names: Rurik, Oleg, Igor.
German-Romance relations
Quite a lot of borrowed vocabulary from German, Dutch, English, Spanish, Italian and French:
- Examples of borrowed vocabulary from German, you can often hear from the military. These are words such as "corporal", "paramedic", "headquarters", "guardhouse", "junker".
- This also includes the terms of the trade sphere: "bill", "freight", "stamp".
- Concepts from the field of art: "landscape", "easel".
- Everyday vocabulary: "tie", "breeches", "clover", "spinach", "chisel", "workbench".
- During the reign of Peter I, the lexicon includes a numbernautical terms from the Dutch language: "tack", "flag", "skipper", "sailor", "rudder", "fleet", "drift".
- Names of animals, objects familiar to us: "raccoon", "umbrella", "bonnet".
The English language has given us such words as "boat", "yacht", "schooner", related to maritime affairs.
Social, everyday concepts, technical and sports terms were also borrowed: "fight", "rally", "tunnel", "tender", "comfort", "gin", "grog", "pudding", "football", "hockey", "basketball", "finish".
From the middle of XVIII-XIX, borrowing from French begins. This is newer borrowed vocabulary.
Here it is worth highlighting the following groups:
- Household items: "medallion", "vest", "coat", "tights", "toilet", "corsage", "veil", "broth", "marmalade", "cutlet".
- A number of words from the field of art: "play", "actor", "director", "entrepreneur".
- Military terminology: "attack", "squadron", "cannonade".
- Political terms: "parliament", "assembly", "exploitation", "demoralization".
FromItalian came:
- Musical terms: aria, tenor, sonata, cavatina.
- Food names: "pasta", "vermicelli".
Spanish borrowed words such as serenade, guitar, caravel, cigar, tomato, caramel.
Today, the use of borrowed vocabulary from the Germano-Romance languages in everyday life is a common phenomenon for us.
Conclusion
Indigenous and borrowed vocabulary make up the vocabulary of the Russian language. The formation of a language is a rather lengthy process. During its development, Russian has replenished with a number of lexemes from various languages. Some borrowings happened so long ago that we can't even imagine that the word we know so well is not originally Russian.
