The Russian Language in the 20th Century

1997 ◽  
Vol 81 (2) ◽  
pp. 272
Author(s):  
Charles E. Townsend ◽  
Bernard Comrie ◽  
Gerald Stone ◽  
Maria Polinsky
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 72-84
Author(s):  
S. T. Zolyan

The concept “sootechestvenniki” is one of the key tools for self-description of society; it is an instrument for drawing borderlines between “we” and “they”. The article describes the development of the meaning of this word since its coinage. The word appeared in the 18th cen­tury as a merger of the Old Slavic and Old Russian ‘otechestvo’ (fatherland, understood as one’s place of origin) and the French ‘compatriot’. This merger resulted in the formation of two new prototypical meanings: one is civic, collective and elevated, and the other gravitates to ethnicity since it is used to refer to Russians. With the strengthening of state institutions in Russia, the first meaning was bound to dominate and it did at the beginning of the 19th century. However, one should speak not about the synthesis, but rather about the discordance of the two meanings. In the 19th century, another meaning developed in the semantic struc­ture of the word: ethnic Russians living abroad. Gradually, the word acquired new evaluative meanings, while negative connotations still prevailed. The basic oppositions (we — they, here — there, ours — alien) interacted in an ambiguous way, substituting each other. A variety of hy­brid “compatriots” arose: we are there, they are here, etc. The heterogeneity of the seman­tics of the word reflects collisions within society, which faced a tragic internal split in the 20th century.


Author(s):  
Elena V. Sergeeva ◽  

Bible words have recently become the focus of linguists’ attention. They are viewed as separate vocabulary group in the system of nominative, expressive and metaphorical means of the Russian language. This paper examines the evolution of Bible words functioning in S. Yesenin’s poems from religious humanism to expressing revolutionary protest. Functioning patterns and techniques of desacralization are studied. The results of Yesenin’s poems analysis demonstrate that the poet used Bible words to convey the message that secular and sacred worlds can overlap. The topic of religious humanitarianism is developed on the basis of desacralization of Bible words that further actualize the meaning of sacrificing for the sake of Revolution. Against-God motives that were characteristic for the literary works of the early 20th century appear in Yesenin’s poetry. Reinterpretation of Bible words in various contexts in literary works definitely indicates their importance for poetic texts, and studying their functioning patterns in different type of discourse could be the focus for a number of further research works.


2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-152
Author(s):  
Valentin A. Bazhanov ◽  
Irving H. Anellis

The article attempts to overview Western scientific knowledge of research in mathematical logic and its history in the USSR and Russia in the first half of the 20th century. We claim that Western scholars followed and were generally aware of the main works of their Soviet and Russian colleagues on mathematical logic and its history. It was possible, firstly, due to the fact that a number of Western scientists knew the Russian language, and, secondly, because Soviet and Russian logicians published their works in English (sometimes in German) in the original journals of mathematical logic or Soviet publishing houses (mainly Mir Publishers) translated Soviet authors into English. Thus, the names of A.G. Dragalin, Yu.L. Ershov, A.S. Karpenko, A.N. Kolmogorov, Z.A. Kuzicheva, Yu.I. Manin, S.Yu. Maslov, F.A. Medvedev, G.E. Mints, V.N. Salii, V.A. Smirnov, A.A. Stolyar, N.I. Styazhkin, V.A. Uspensky, I.M. Yaglom, S.A. Yanovskaya, A.P. Yushkevich, A.A. Zinov’ev were quite known to their Western counterparts. With the dawn of perestroika, contacts of Soviet / Russian logicians expanded significantly. Nevertheless, the analysis of Western works on mathematical logic and the history of logic suggests that by the end of the 20th century the interest of Western scientists in the works of their Russian colleagues had noticeably waned.


Author(s):  
O.Yu. Vasilyeva ◽  
M.V. Komarova

In the article the naming units denoting means of transportation are considered in the framework of the linguoculturological approach, which allowed to identify the specifics of the formation of both the regional nominative fund and national thinking in a certain epoch in the development of Russian literary language, which is facilitated by the comparative characteristics of an occasional word usage with the data of the National Corpus of the Russian language. Lexical-semantic, historical-etymological, word-forming and functional features of the analysed language units are revealed. The material for the study was texts of different genres, created and published on the territory of the Siberian region in the late 19th century — the first half of the 20th century.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 440-447
Author(s):  
Evgeniya N. Laguzova ◽  
Elena N. Martynova

The article presents a structural and semantic analysis of stable expressions of the 20th century with the adjective orange, many of which are based on metaphorical and associative-symbolic use of their constituent components. Among the ways of the author's transformation of such lexical units, the authors note the addition and replacement of significant parts of speech with other forms of the same word or synonyms, as well as a change in the location of the components of the expression in relation to each other, which not only does not destroy the idiom, but, on the contrary, intensifies its meaning. The evolution of the original meaning of expressions with the color adjective orange is shown, which is due to the change (expansion) of the circle of nouns combined with the adjective, the implication of evaluation, the formation of new synonymous links with metaphor. Particular attention is paid to stable expressions with political significance, the largest number of which began to appear since 2013 in connection with political events taking place in Ukraine, where orange was chosen for the symbols of the Ukrainian opposition. The development of negative connotations in the expression orange revolution is explained by the corresponding semantic potential of the adjective orange itself, for which semes with negative connotations are productive in speech. The expansion of the compatibility of the adjective orange in modern Russian has led to the emergence of new meanings for the adjectival. Using examples extracted from the newspaper subcorpus of the National Corpus of the Russian Language, representing a collection of texts of printed newspapers and electronic agencies of the 2000s, it is shown that the use of stable expressions with the color adjective orange reflects the tendency characteristic of the development of the modern Russian language to expressivize the written text in connection with the formation of an evaluative statement capable of conveying the attitude of a journalist to social, cultural, political events. At the same time, the expressed social axiological assessment performs various functions in the text: from attracting attention and overcoming the standard to manipulating the consciousness of the mass reader.


Author(s):  
Yu.A. Lysenko ◽  
M.V. Rygalova ◽  
Y.N. Yegorenkova

The problem of homogeneity and integrity of the Russian Empire state territories became topical in the se-cond half of the 19th century. Its resolution was reflected in the administrative and legal integration, based on the policy of Russification and introduction of the Russian language in all spheres of life of the society. The purpose of this article is to reconstruct the mechanisms and particularities of the implementation of this policy in the Central Asian outskirts of the Russian Empire — the Governor-Generalship of the Steppes. The study is based on a wide range of hsitorical sources — regulations and paperwork, most of which have been identified in archives and in-troduced into the scientific discourse for first time. It has been revealed that the implementation of the Russifica-tion policy in the Steppe Territory followed two directions. The first one involved the introduction of paperwork management in Russian language into the local governments system. This process iniciated very actively in the beginning of the 20th century after the settlement of the legal status of the Russian language in the Russian Em-pire. Applicants for the positions of volost, aul and kishlak rulers, which were elective, were required to pass an exam on Russian language knowledge the prior to the ballot. Failure in the exam would immediately disqualify the candidate from further electoral process. The second important direction of expanding the influence of the Rus-sian language in the Steppe Territory was the educational policy related to the formation of a secular school edu-cation system and the mandatory inclusion of the Russian language course into the educational process. A net-work of Russian-Kyrgyz, Russian-aul, and missionary schools, Cyrillic-based alphabets for regional languages, educational-methodological literature in Russian were created in the region. The Russian language course be-came compulsory in programs of Muslim metebas and madrassas to raise the effectiveness of the Russification policy. Until the end of the imperial period, regional authorities failed to form a staff of ethnic officials who could speak Russian. The level of knowledge of the Russian language in the rest of the indigenous population remained extremely low, which was due to unpopularity of the Russian school system. Thus, it can be stated that the poten-tial of the Russian language as a means of integration into the common empire space was not fully utilized. At the same time, it cannot be denied, that Russian culture, historically close to Muslim peoples of the Central Asian region, embodied in the imperial educational system, played a positive role, acting as a conductor of their in-volvement in the achievements of European civilization.


Author(s):  
Elena A. Oglezneva ◽  
Oleg V. Pustovalov

The article is devoted to the study of a language functioning in foreign countries, outside its metropolis. This is a special form of language existence. The study is made in linguistic personology aspect: the factors of preservation of the native language in the speech of several generations of emigrants are identified by the means of analyzing the language competencies and the specifics of the native language of representatives of the foreign diaspora. The purpose of this article is to create the speech portrait of the representative of the East emigration, the descendants of Russian emigrants in China, the Chinese Three Rivers region, to identify the characteristics of preservation of the Russian language in conditions of the Russian-Chinese bilingualism in this area. The object of the speech portraiting was the linguistic personality of a descendant of Russian immigrants to China in the beginning of the 20th century, currently a resident of the city of Labudalin, Argun city district of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous region in China. Scientific novelty of the research consists in undertaking for the first time the analysis of a fragment of the Russian linguistic reality in one of the places of the Russian diaspora in the 20th century, in the Chinese Three Rivers region, and in the introduction record of oral speech of the representative of the descendants of Russian in Three Rivers Region, carried out during the scientific expeditions to China in 2017 and 2018, that makes a unique material. The study of the Russian language in foreign countries, namely in the Eastern abroad, in the Three Rivers region, is a contribution to linguistic emigrantology, which determines the relevance of the study. The authors analyze the speech of a representative of the descendants of Russian settlers in the Chinese Three Rivers Region at all levels of the language system, reveal the facts of phonetical, grammatical and lexical interference in Russian speech under the influence of the Chinese language, as well as the dialectal features preserved in it, and come to the conclusion that Russian language is highly preserved even in the third generation of immigrants from Russia to China and the authors name the sociolinguistic factors of this preservation: family, educational, professional, psychological, etc.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document