Dar176.Html

IN SLOVAK 176 (241)
Projective lexicon of the Russian language March 25, 2007

---

In this issue: about the position of the Russian language in the world

As you know, the President of Russia declared 2007 the Year of the Russian Language, and First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev was appointed chairman of the organizing committee for its implementation.
The magazine "New Time" approached me with questions about the meaning of this state action. Below are my answers. Publication: " New Time ", #5, March 12, 2007. [1]

1. Why do you think 2007 was declared the year of the Russian language? What happened to the country and language this year?

Perhaps the authorities have finally realized that the search for a national idea, although unsuccessful in itself, ultimately leads to a national language. It is unlikely that any political, or philosophical, or religious ideology can unite society these days. Rather, she can split it. The meaning-forming unity of the people is given not in the idea, but in the language. Not in slogans, but in roots, prefixes and suffixes. Not in political programs, but in the grammar that determines the mentality of society. Already on phrases we disagree, but at the level of texts misunderstandings, suspicions, and social battles begin. Language can express a variety of ideas, but the mentality remains the same, inherent in the language itself. One says “I have power”, the other “I have money”, but they both use the same construction, which is practically absent in other European languages. They say not “I have”, but “I have”. And this is a profound difference: whether the subject of property is a subject, as in English or French, or an indirect object, as in Russian. If we want deep social transformations, then they must pass through language, through new thinking skills, through the creative development of vocabulary and grammar.

2. What should be the role of the Russian language?

The state of the Russian language at the end of the 20th century is alarming. It seems that along with the depopulation of the country, there is a delexexification of its language and an impoverishment of vocabulary. At the end of the 19th century, the lexical reserves of the Russian and English languages, judging by the most complete dictionaries of that era, were approximately the same, and their growth rate in Russian was higher. By the end of the 20th century. The vocabulary of English is approximately 5 times larger than that of Russian (accordingly, 750 thousand - 150 thousand words, judging by the largest dictionaries). The tragedy is that we have gone through the era of linguocide , communist newspeak. According to J. Orwell, Newspeak is “the only language in the world whose vocabulary is shrinking every year” (“1984”). [2] So the Russian language has lost many of its former treasures and has not been able to develop many of the concepts that civilized humanity managed to acquire over the 20th century. And now he is feverishly trying to make up for lost time, choking on barbarisms and Anglicisms. It's time to pay attention to the creative development of the Russian language, its growth from its own roots, the dynamic updating of its lexical composition and grammatical structure, the expansion of its conceptual and communicative capabilities and its more active inclusion in the global linguosphere and noosphere of the 21st century.

The Russian language still has a struggle to become a useful, working language of modern civilization. Let's take vocabulary for example. What Russian words have entered world use? "Vodka, Tsar, Bolshevik, KGB, Gulag, pogrom, borscht, samovar." Another word is “satellite,” which, in fact, one can be proud of, although it is almost never used in the world anymore. That's almost all of our linguistic exports. This is all that the world repeats after us. Compare with the global export of English words, including into the Russian language: thousands, tens of thousands, and the most important in meaning! They almost completely cover our need to designate everything new, fashionable, and advanced. How many words and what meanings are exported is a more important indicator of a people’s participation in world civilization than the export of gas or oil. We are talking about the competitiveness of the Russian language on the scale of the global information system. The state has to reckon with the fact that language is the main capital of the information age, concentrating a larger share of national wealth than all minerals combined.

Here are the latest data on language segments of the Internet. English accounts for 30% of World Wide Web users, Chinese - 14%, Spanish - 8%. Portuguese and Korean share 7-8 places, 3.1% each. And Russian is not even in the top ten; it is represented by fewer network devices than Italian or Arabic.

3. How do you feel about spelling reform?

Spelling and spelling are not such an important issue in comparison with the critical position of the Russian language in the modern linguistic sphere. Hypnotized by the sayings of Lomonosov and Turgenev about the greatness and power of the Russian language, we rest on the laurels of the 19th century, preferring not to notice how our language is shrinking on the linguistic map of the 21st century, falling into provincial dependence and imitation. Is there really no more convenient expression in the Russian language to denote the everyday activities of millions of educated people who send e-mail than the stupid, linguistically humiliating “send by soap” - an onomatopoeia distorted to the point of nonsense in English? Meanwhile, large-scale public discussions about language flare up in Russia, as a rule, only in connection with projects of spelling reforms that affect the most minor and formal aspects in the life of the language. It’s as if the fate of a language depends on the spelling “tsi” or “qi” or on the use of a hyphen in adverbs, and not on how rich in concepts and meanings this language is and whether it is able to grow and branch from its own roots. It is not spelling reforms that should concern Russian society, but the prospects for the creative evolution of the Russian language, its lexical richness and grammatical flexibility, the ability to absorb and multiply the subtlest shades of thought.

Recently, the Center for Creative Development of the Russian Language was created at St. Petersburg University, which sets itself precisely such tasks. The main one is the expansion of the contribution of the Russian language and the Russian linguistic sphere to the development of global intellectual resources, the advancing influence of the Russian language on the formation of new concepts and terms that can be assimilated by the international community. The Russian language is called upon to reveal not only its vitality, but also its attractiveness as an instrument of creative thinking, the production of those ideas and meanings that become relevant for the whole world and influence the public consciousness of developed countries. Of course, to implement such large-scale tasks, the participation of the entire society and the state is necessary. We need a community of philologists, writers, journalists, teachers who would realize a simple thing: if a language does not create new words, it dies, it becomes a dead language, and its space is taken over by other, dynamically developing languages ​​that transfer their alphabet into it .

If the moment comes when the majority of words in the Russian language are borrowed from European ones, then the question of switching from the Cyrillic alphabet to the Latin alphabet will naturally arise, since the alphabet serves as the clearest representation of the vocabulary of the language. Words such as “speechwriter” or “bodybuilding”, “upgrade” and “new waver”, even the already familiar “manager” and “marketing” look much more intelligible and transparent in Latin. Alas, some kind of dogmatic rigidity hangs over the topic of language in Russia. In the debate about the two- or three-fingered sign of the cross, Russia in the 20th atheistic century lived to the point of threatening to cease being a Christian country altogether. Also, in disputes about the spelling of “and” and “s” after pinching, Russia in the 21st century may live to see that the Cyrillic alphabet, as unnecessary, will be archived and forgotten in one or two generations, so Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy our great-grandchildren will already have to read Latin. It’s good if it’s not in English translation. Or in "Ruslish" (" Russian -skiy ing -lish"), which will become one of the provincial versions of English, with a small inclusion of native words like "toska" and "bespredel".

---------------------------------------------------------------
1. The title of the article belongs to the editors: “ Pushkina, Dostoevskogo i Tolstogo nashim pravnukam pridetsa chitat na latinitse .” Moreover, these letters are written on birch bark writing, from which samples of ancient Russian writing have come down to us. This is sarkazm.

2. Says Syme, philologist, compiler of a Newspeak dictionary: “You probably think that our main job is to invent new words. Nothing has happened. We destroy words - tens, hundreds every day. If you like, we leave a skeleton of the language. /. ../ Did you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary is shrinking every year?” (J. Orwell, "1984", part 1, 5).

___________________________________________________________________

Next we present a number of statistical tables indicating the position of the Russian language in the world.

Number of speakers of world languages
What languages ​​are spoken in the USA?
What foreign languages ​​are studied in the USA
Languages ​​on the Internet

Number of speakers of world languages
(both on native and acquired), 1997, in millions

1. Chinese (1120)
2. English (480)
3. Spanish (320)
4. Russian (285)
5. French (265)
6. Hindi/Urdu (250)
7. Arabic (221)
8.Portuguese (188)
9. Bengal (185)
10. Japanese (133)
11. German (109)

http://www2.ignatius.edu/faculty/turner/languages.htm
___________________________________________________________________

What languages ​​are spoken in the USA (2000)

Population: 5 years and older - 262 million.
Speak only English 215 million
Other languages ​​spoken 47 million
In thousands
Spanish 28 101
Chinese 2,022
French 1,643 plus 453 Franco-Creole
German 1,383
Tagalog (Filipino) 1,224
Vietnamese 1 009
Italian 1 008
Korean 894
Russian 706
Polish 667
Arabic 614
Portuguese 565
Japanese 477
Greek 365
317 in Hindi
Persian 312
Urdu 262
Serbo-Croatian 233
Armenian 202
Hebrew 195
Vessel 179

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0762163.html

_________________________________________________________________

What foreign languages ​​are studied in the USA?

2002, in thousands of university and college students

Spanish 746
French 202
German 91
Italian 64
American Sign Language 61
Japanese 52
Chinese 34
Latin 30
Russian 24
Ancient Greek 20

If you add up biblical and modern Hebrew, they will take 10th place, 22 thousand.

Trends: over 4 years, from 1998 to 2002, the number of students studying Spanish increased by 13%, Italian by 30%, Japanese 21%, Chinese 20%, Latin 14%, Ancient Greek 24%, Hebrew 44%, Russian - by 0.5 % (lowest indicator in the table).

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0905275.html

___________________________________________________________________

Languages ​​on the Internet (2006)

In million users
Top ten:
English 30% 327
Chinese 14% 153
Spanish 8% 87
Japanese 7.9% 86
German 5.4% 59
French 5% 55
Portuguese 3.1% 34
Korean 3.1% 34
Italian 2.8% 31
Arabic 2.6% 28.5

Russian 23.7

http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats4.htm

____________________________________________________________
Aphorism

"...Although our language is rich, it is not as processed as others, and to this day very few philosophical and physical books have been translated into Russian. It will be necessary to compose or invent new words, just as the Germans composed and invented them, having begun to write in my own language; but, giving all justice to this latter, whose wealth and power are known to me, I will say that our language in itself is much more pleasant."
N. M. Karamzin. Letters from a Russian traveler. Letter to Bonnet, Geneva, January 23, 1789, trans. from French, in the book. N. M. Karamzin. Op. in 2 vols., vol. 1, L., Hood. lit., 1984, p.250.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Memo

readable - something that reads well is conducive to quick, enjoyable reading.

What can be heated, what can be heated well, we call firey . What breaks well is brittle . That which melts and forges well is fusible and malleable . So what do you call something that reads well?

Well, how do you like my storyteller? - Very readable . But nothing more.

Another readable product of Mr. P. has come out. But we have the right to expect from a gifted writer not only readability , but some more meaningful insight into the essence of things.

A readable work is not necessarily artistically convincing. It is unlikely that "Faust" can be considered readable . And yet, for most “non-genius” writings, legibility is not only a virtue, but also a necessary requirement. Why write something that can't be read?

See the article by M. Epstein in Nezavisimaya Gazeta (December 8, 2005) Sensitive people, sensitive books. About the merits of readers to literature.
( issue 141 )

_________________________________________________________________
In the "Russian Journal" (March 24, 2007) Olga Balla published a review " Somatodicy and the fate of rationalism " on the book by M. Epstein "Philosophy of the Body" and G. Tulchinsky "Body of Freedom" - two monographs published on the same cover (St. Petersburg, Aletheia, 2006). The theme of the book is a new concept of the body in the information age, when the specificity of a person is increasingly defined as an “embodied mind” (as opposed to the mind operating in information systems and computers).

Nezavisimaya Gazeta (March 22, 2007) published an interview between Alexey Nilogov and Mikhail Epstein:
Multiplication of entities and voids. Mikhail Epshtein expands the capabilities of the Russian language .

_________________________________________________________________
The network project “The Gift of Words” has been published since April 2000. Every week, several new words are sent to subscribers, with definitions and examples of use. These words are not in any dictionary, and yet they denote significant phenomena and concepts for which there has not yet been a place in the public consciousness. "Dar" also conducts discussions about the Russian language, discusses letters and suggestions from readers. Modern Russian (and any) language is only one slice of the linguistic continuum, which extends into the past and future, and it virtually contains thousands of words that have not yet been identified, not pronounced, but are called into speech as the historical consciousness of the people expands , and in turn expanding it. “The Gift of Speech” can serve as a guide to word creation, an introduction to the linguistic and conceptual sphere of the 21st century. All previous issues.

Subscribe your friends to “Dar” (you need to insert into this form ) your email address

PreDictionary - a collection of English neologisms by M. Epstein.

Association of Word and Term Finders ( AIST ) is a linguistic community on LiveJournal. An open platform for discussing new words and ideas.

The future of the humanities is the community in LiveJournal.

Gramma. ru is a Runet language portal dedicated to the culture of written speech.