Samizdat and Sami-Syby-Izdat

The word "samizdat" has an author, and he is known, - says Tatyana Bakhmina : the head of the archive of the Memorial society :

- This is Nikolai Glazkov . Look, here his collections of poems are exhibited. He published himself and at the same time wrote on the cover: "Sami-Sbya-Izdat." This is by analogy with some kind of state lord. And so it turned out "samizdat", from reduction.

And now the question is Valery Demyankov , Deputy Director of the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences:

-Valery Zakievich, on his home-made books the poet wrote "Sam-Sbya-Izdat." In one word, this design merged later, apparently, being picked up by oral colloquial speech. Can we say that this is a case that is unique to the Russian language when, speaking of a scientific language, neologism undergoes abbreviation?

"Samizdat" is a word as a unit of the Russian language recorded, but "Sam-Syby-Izdat" remained local

- This is not a unique case. I must recall that this word was originally written with two hyphens, with two dashes-"Sam-Syby-Izdat." This is a technique that is used, by the way, in other languages, for example, in English, when they want to make one word from one whole phrase that behaves as one noun. In this case, this word has authorship, and many dictionaries indicate it, in particular, the recently released “Russian language explanatory dictionary” with the inclusion of information about the origin of words edited by academician Natalia Shvedova . Everyone knows Ozhegov’s dictionary. For many decades, this dictionary was published according to Natalya Yulievna. And now her team has published a new dictionary indicating history. And this dictionary includes the word "samizdat".

The history of Russian words, just as the history of neologisms in other languages, resembles creativity in other areas of our lives. We can say that the rituals of this work are very reminiscent of how in some cultures they represent the society of a newborn child. In my youth, I was engaged in Africanism. Some African peoples have such a custom: a father or a man who is attributed to paternity, lies, skillfully portraying the experiences of a woman with a child, in a special hut, where he accepts congratulations from relatives and friends. And the biological mother comes to the hut only secretly to feed the child. So in language creativity: there is not only a father who receives laurels for the creation, which is indicated in dictionaries, as the creator of this word. There are a lot of such creators in the history of the Russian language. But there is also a mother, namely, a language system, in the bowels of which new words of our language are born.

- It is no coincidence who wrote through these hyphades “Sam-Sbya-Izdat”, is known, but who has already reduced to “samizdat”- you will not install.

- In any case, in this wonderful dictionary we will not see from what moment this word began to sound in a shortened version. But the fact that the middle part of this phrase has fallen - “self” is a rather mysterious circumstance. You can explain in different ways. The most begging solution is for the sake of brevity. But, nevertheless, “Sam-Syby-Izdat” and “Samizdat” are still different things.

- Certainly. Because not only those who were the author of texts were engaged in samizdat.

- Yes. But, nevertheless, “samizdat” is a word as a unit of the Russian language recorded, but “Sam-Syby-Izdat” remained locally used. In these cases, we are not even talking about neologisms, but about occasionalisms, that is, such expressions and words that one or more times are found in one or more, but we will never see them anywhere outside these contexts.