Words play an essential role in human life and society. They help express thoughts and emotions, describe phenomena and objects, communicate and transmit information. The modern world is incredibly changeable, so the enrichment of the vocabulary of the language is constantly happening. Words appear that denote new phenomena and things. Other words are changing, falling into disuse or disappearing altogether.
Vocabulary: term definition
Vocabulary, or the vocabulary of a language, is the totality of words in a given language. It includes any existing word, even very rarely used. The term "vocabulary" can also be used in relation to a variety of language (for example, book vocabulary), a writer (Dostoevsky's vocabulary), a work (Eugene Onegin's vocabulary), or any person (the lecturer has a rich vocabulary). The formation of the vocabulary of a language is a complex, continuous and lengthy process. Lexicology and lexicography are engaged in the study of vocabulary.
Lexicology
From the Greek "lexicology" literally translates as "the science of the word." This scientific discipline studies the vocabulary of the language. The object of consideration is the word as a significant lexical unit. Lexicologists find out the meaning and characteristics of certain words, their place in the language system, origin and stylistic coloring. The science of the vocabulary of a language analyzes and describes the laws of archaization and renewal of the lexical system.
Lexicography
Lexicography is a special section of linguistics that deals with the compilation and study of various dictionaries. The value of such aids is difficult to overestimate, because they not only allow people to master the language more deeply, but also accumulate the vocabulary of the language. This helps to organize the language system and vocabulary.
Compilation of dictionaries is a useful, but very hard work. Authors spend decades creating them. For example, Vladimir Dal spent more than 50 years working on his famous explanatory dictionary, which included about 200,000 words and about 30,000 sayings and proverbs. Lexicography is an important science that studies the vocabulary of a language, it allows you to visually observe the transformation of words, changes in their interpretations and meanings, monitors the emergence of new lexical units and the disappearance of obsolete ones.
Classification
All words in the vocabulary of a language can be classified according to three characteristics.
- By origin: native Russian, Old Slavic, borrowed.
- Posphere of use: common and limited use.
- By frequency of use: active and passive vocabulary.
Russian words
Indigenously Russian words make up approximately 90% of the entire vocabulary of the language. These words can be divided into historical layers according to the time when they came and took root in the Russian language.
- The oldest, deepest layer is the Proto-Indo-European language, which is considered the forerunner of all Slavic and most European languages. There is no exact periodization, many scientists admit that Proto-Indo-European was spoken about eight thousand years ago. From this ancient language, such words as daughter, birch, mother, son, coal, s alt, moon, oak, shore, water came to Russian and survived.
- Common Slavic or Proto-Slavic - dates back to the sixth century AD. Examples of words: gold, night, fox, head, side, frost, forehead, court, faith, pumpkin, finger, apple, tribe, summer, poplar, snow, day, pit, ford, cute, stupid, one, five, one hundred.
- Common East Slavic or Old Russian layer - covers the period from the sixth to the fourteenth century and includes words that are not found among the southern and western Slavs. Examples: icy, snowfall, guy, talker, buckwheat, jackdaw, uncle, cat, tornado, bullfinch.
- Actually Russian words that serve as the basis for the vocabulary of the language, they determine the specifics and characteristics of modern vocabulary. This time layer began after the fourteenth century and continues today. Examples: child, get lost, cucumber, grandmother, play tricks,dim, canary, lilac, strawberry, dandelion, chicken, cloudy, butterfly.
Old Church Slavonicisms
A special group of words that came into the Russian language from liturgical books during the spread of Orthodoxy in Russia. The main sources for borrowing were Greek church texts translated by Cyril and Methodius in the eleventh century. Many of these words have survived to this day: power, youth, enemy, god, equal, priest, grace, Lord, sweet, cross.
Borrowed words
Mastered or borrowed are words that came into the Russian vocabulary from foreign languages. They make up about a tenth of the vocabulary of the Russian language. These words have completely settled down in a language environment that was initially alien to them and now obey all the rules of Russian grammar, are transmitted using phonetic and graphic means of the Russian language, have a stable meaning and are actively used in various areas of human knowledge and activity.
Borrowings occurred as a result of a variety of economic, military, political, cultural relations between Russia and other states. Assimilated words became synonymous with already existing Russian words or replaced them. Polish, English, German, Italian, Greek, French, Turkic, Dutch and Latin had a particularly great influence on Russian vocabulary. Examples: saber, clown, square, verse, tea, canister, film,fair, orange, rocket, shark, zenith, fiesta, postulate, backpack, ottoman, driver, case, office, confusion, table, tomato, firm, fakir, arsenal, kefir, oval, peat, sandals, locomotive.
Common and restricted words
Common words include those words that are used and understood by native Russian speakers without territorial, professional, social restrictions. They include: most nouns (summer, snow, game, fire, table, soup), verbs (run, breathe, do, write, glow), adjectives (blue, close, right, English, spring, joyful), adverbs (painful, ashamed, understandable, beautiful, sweet), almost all pronouns, numerals and service parts of Russian speech.
Words with limited use are mainly found in a certain area or are used in certain social groups united by common interests, profession, occupation. They can be divided into the following categories:
1. Terms. Used to accurately interpret the meaning of certain phenomena and concepts. The terms are characterized by unambiguity and complete absence of expressive and emotional coloring. Examples:
- Music: backart, fugue, minor tone, overture, dominant.
- Math: differential, cosine, hyperbole, percentage, integral.
- Medicine: epicrisis, angina pectoris, history, injection, laparoscopy.
- Construction: adhesion, aerated concrete, screed, trowel, theodolite.
2. Dialectisms. Primarilyused by residents of a certain area, beyond which they rarely go. Examples:
- Bryansk region: kumar (nap or sleep), gayno (mess).
- Irkutsk region: buragozit (conflict), forks (cabbage head).
- Volgograd region: junction (ungainly person), cool (hair gathered in a bun).
- Primorye: vtaritsya (buy something), nabka (embankment).
3. professionalism. Used by people of a certain profession. For programmers: encoder, broken link, crack, net, screw. For printers and publishers: lead, header, footer. For the military: Kalash, kapterka, granik, integrity, lip. Musicians: soundtrack, plywood, cover, labukh, live.
4. Jargon. They are a collection of colloquial speech of people, characteristic of certain social groups, do not belong to the literary language, but often the authors use them in works of art to give the characters a specific expressive coloring. There is jargon for criminals (cormorant, cop, mansion), youth (dude, muzlo, girl), schoolchildren (fizra, nerd, homework), football fan slang (negotiable, abik, football).
Active and passive vocabulary
The active vocabulary includes words that are constantly and actively used by native Russian speakers in all areas of activity. These words are effortlessly and unambiguously understood in almost any context.
Passive vocabulary is made up of obsolete or completely new words thatwithout the help of dictionaries are understood vaguely or not understood at all. Such words best demonstrate the process of changing the vocabulary of a language and fall into the following categories.
Archaisms are words that were supplanted by younger and more successful synonyms: cardian (heart), bedchamber (bedroom), boiled (sultry), nobility (skill), finger (finger), mirror (mirror)
- Historicisms are words that denote disappeared phenomena and objects: coachman, caftan, landowner, oprichnik, span, laborer, armyak, lead, salop.
- Neologisms are very young words that have not yet become part of the active vocabulary: ufology, bonus, google, message, offline, reflection, emoticon.
