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IN SLOVAK # 150 (208)
Projective lexicon of the Russian language
April 2, 2006

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Announcement:
The ru_humanities community has opened on LiveJournal. It is for those who want to move in new ways in the humanities: for philosophers and cultural scientists, psychologists and anthropologists, art and literary critics, semioticians and cognitive scientists, linguists and historians of ideas.

http://community.livejournal.com/ru_humanities
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I hope that many readers of The Gift will join this community, which will discuss, in particular, issues of linguistics and its interaction with other disciplines.

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This author's issue is the anniversary, the 150th (during the same time, 58 guest, reader and competition issues were published, so the total numbering of the mailing list is 208).

In this issue I would like to address the project as a whole. We are posting here an article that examines the connection between the Projective Dictionary and other metalinguistic projects in Russia and the cultural movements of their time. *

Projective approaches to language: realism - avant-garde - postmodern. Superlanguage.

Michael Epstein

Let's compare the Projective Dictionary, as a type of sign-generating activity, with those projects that were carried out in the field of the Russian language by Vladimir Dahl and Velimir Khlebnikov. The contribution of each of them to Russian word creation is estimated, according to researchers, to be more than ten thousand new formations. [1]

Each of these projects, for all its uniqueness, is inscribed in the cultural paradigm of its time. Vladimir Dal is a lexicographer of the great era of realism, and his work on collecting words is motivated precisely by the need to present the language in the form in which it is actually used by the people, and not reflected on paper: to abandon foreign and book influences and bring written speech as close as possible to oral speech. “From the time the compiler of this dictionary can remember himself, he was worried and embarrassed by the incongruity of our written language with the oral speech of a simple Russian person.... The language of the people is undoubtedly our most important and inexhaustible spring or mine, the treasury of our language, which is in writing strayed far from what he should have been." [2]. Even when Dahl introduced words of his own coinage into the dictionary, partly to displace borrowings, partly to show all possible root connections of words and fill in the gaps of word formation, he tried to pass them off as overheard, recorded from a living voice, assuming that the language of the people is an objective reality, which should be reflected in the dictionary. For example, he introduces the words “help”, “allowance”, enriching the dictionary with them “If there is a verb: posoblivat , posobit , that is, posablivat , even if it was not in our books, and there is: posablivaniye , posobleniye , posob and posobka , etc. To whom can I refer that these words exist, that I did not invent them? In the Russian ear, no one else." (Preface to the Dictionary). In the "red line", i.e. in the title of the dictionary entries, there is not a single word created by Dahl, since any outright "gag" would be perceived as a violation of that principle scientificity, the appearance of which he tried to maintain - although he could not remain only an outside observer and resist throwing himself into the seething element of word creation. Hence the name: "Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language", in the same sense as " living life" constitutes both the subject, the goal, and the highest justification of art for such different contemporaries of V. Dahl as N. Chernyshevsky and L. Tolstoy. "Life", "living" is the key word of the second half of the 19th century, the era of realism, naturalism, positivism, philosophy of life...

There is hardly any need to prove that the language creativity of Velimir Khlebnikov fits into the mental makeup of a completely different, avant-garde era. Khlebnikov’s “Dictionaries”, all these long experimental lists of lexical new formations, of which only a few found their way into his actual poetic and prose texts, aim precisely at the creation of an unprecedented, “abstruse” language. This language, like the “star alphabet,” flickers far from everyday language and is not even intended for use in speech; it exists on its own, like a window into another universe. In Khlebnikov’s system of worldview, the abstruse is opposed to the living.
“Separating from everyday language, the self-evident word is as different from the living one as the rotation of the earth around the sun is different from the everyday rotation of the sun around the earth. The self-evident word renounces the ghosts of a given everyday environment and builds starry twilight to replace self-evident lies.” [3] The overwhelming majority of Khlebnikov’s new words not only remained unused by him, they are generally unusable, they do not fit into any speech, they do not serve any communication or communication. This prophetic tongue-tiedness does not want to have anything to do with the “living” language; new words are signs of higher meanings that can only be uttered through breakthroughs, powerful sound eruptions in a circle of reverent silence. The artist’s linguistic fantasy and experiment make a programmatic break from the present towards the future.

This “Projective Dictionary” is a project that is neither realistic nor avant-garde, but rather a postmodern type. It comes from the understanding of sign systems that developed in the last decades of the 20th century. There are no firmly defined boundaries between linguistic reality and linguistic creativity. Language is not some kind of self-sufficient reality that lends itself to objective dictionary description. Those words that are included in dictionaries were themselves once constructed, and their meanings continue to be constructed in the process of their dictionary description and interpretation. Since there is no self-sufficient linguistic reality, then linguistic creativity is not positioned in opposition to this reality or in isolation from it, as the avant-garde project was supposed to do. New words do not go into the realm of pure linguistic fantasy and experiment; they do not disdain everyday speech and, in general, any speech context. The “self-motivated” word of the avant-garde is being replaced by a “busy” word, which is trying to penetrate the language, to prove in practice its involvement in the speech practices of our time. It does not retreat into the future in order to confront the present from there, but, on the contrary, in every possible way blurs the difference between the future and the present, between the possible and the existing. A projective dictionary is a collection word probes , launched as an experiment into samples of colloquial or book speech. The word presented in the projective dictionary is neither a “living” word in Dalev’s sense, coming from the lips of the people (or secretly, promptly suggested to him by the compiler himself), nor a “absentuous” word in Khlebnikov’s sense, coming from the lips of a poet-visionary . This virtual word is a word-hypothesis, a word-assumption, which does not hide its composition (like Dahl), but also does not insist on its independence (like Khlebnikov), but tries to make its way from the dictionary into speech. Through speech examples, a new word introduces itself into the practice of language, into its most diverse stylistic zones, from vernacular to philosophy, from newspapers to science fiction.

Therefore, in one speech example of the “Projective Dictionary” there is never more than one newly formed word, otherwise the impression of an abstruse, “other”, artificial language would be created. The futurists strove for such an effect of defamiliarization , creating large accumulations of newly invented words, like “No one bows a little with a bow / In the screaming of the dawn” (V. Khlebnikov, 1908). For the situation at the turn of the 20th - 21st centuries. What is more important, on the contrary, is the method of mastering , getting used to something unusual and strange, domesticating exotic innovations that invade our lives and language as a result of the grotesque mixing of different cultures and the acceleration of techno-informational progress. The civilization of the turn of the century is being renewed so rapidly, “avant-garde”, there is so much strange, unusual, incomprehensible in it that the emphasis in culture is on the habitability of these revolutionary elements, on the life-likeness of our fantasies. In whatever elite or experimental field (technical, aesthetic, economic) a new sign is born, it asks to be included in the language of society, into everyday use, and tries to enter the network of sign exchanges that connects all speakers of a given language.

This technique, in contrast to defamiliarization and by analogy with it, can be called habituation . On the one hand, the possibility of language, on the other, the habituation of neologisms. The peculiarity of hyperreality , which is created in mass communication networks, is that it is more real, life-like, than “reality” outside these networks. More precisely, it represents the “true” reality, created by more intensive methods of visual, linguistic, and information interventions than the methods of constructing the “natural” reality, which developed spontaneously over millennia. Along with visual hyperreality, a sign hyperreality is also created - hyperlanguage , or superlanguage , about which it cannot be said whether it is “real” or “unreal”. Is the electronic network real or unreal, are television shows real or unreal? They present a more intensive way of updating the sign system, a higher degree of hyperreality - made yesterday and today.

In the same way, hyperlanguage , created, in particular, by a projective vocabulary, is not a pure experiment of the avant-garde kind; on the contrary, it is an expansion of the existing language, the expansion of its hypothetical volume, just as the aerial backdrop of a picturesque panorama forms one whole with the objects in the foreground. Imagine that as you enter the panorama, the drawn outlines of the backdrop turn into three-dimensional, three-dimensional objects. This is the purpose of a hyperlanguage - to enter the realm of use, or at least usability, over many years and decades, just as a scientific hypothesis is intended to be tested commensurate with the physical or historical scale of the assumptions themselves. The test of a word in a language is one of the longest historical tests, since language also changes more slowly than other sign systems: literature, science, technology.

Let us refer to Alan Metcalfe, an American linguist, president of the Dialectological Society of the USA, whose department also includes slang, jargons, and neologisms. Alan Metcalfe believes that the probationary period for new words, which determines the long-term prospect of their adoption or rejection in the language, is 40 years. “Even if a new word or phrase is impressive in its success, past experience shows that only the life of two generations, or about 40 years, is sufficient time to judge whether a word will enter the permanent language stock.”[4] However, two-valued logic: whether it will be included or not, is not the most reliable when assessing the usefulness and “survivability” of a word, especially if we judge this by its presence in general language dictionaries. The word “flickers” on the borders of the language, can be forgotten and reborn, enter the game and go to the bench. In the future, obviously, there will be no dictionaries at all as stable, closed compendiums born of the era of paper printing. A virtual dictionary will be automatically compiled from the sum of the use of all words in electronic networks. Each new word will be automatically added to the alphabetical dictionary and take its place in the general frequency list. Actually, already now Google and other Internet search engines automatically perform the dictionary function of determining the frequency of each word. At the same time, it is becoming increasingly difficult to establish which word is considered existing and which is not.

“The Gift of Speech” as a project has both artistic and scientific components.
On the one hand, this is word creation, logopoeia , the creation of minimal works of literature of one word in size (this genre can be called “ one-word ”). On the other hand, these new words are presented lexicographically, described both in terms of semantics and pragmatics. They are given a definition, they are correlated with their synonyms and antonyms that already exist in the language, and with similar words in other languages; their introduction into the language is motivated by the presence of gaps among concepts and the task of their articulation, i.e. lexical innovation is supported by conceptual innovation. Logopoeia and lexicography complement each other in this project.

Finally, each word is given in action, with examples of its use. It is impossible to introduce a new word into speech only by logical definition of meaning, because, as L. Wittgenstein said, “the meaning of a word is its use.” Since the new word has never been used before, dictionary sayings become a genre of literary and linguistic composition . The constructive linguistic task - the justification and introduction of a new sign into the system of signs - can only be solved by the creation of a small literary work in the genre of "example" or "speech", usually one or two sentences in size. These speech examples, belonging to the author-compiler, have a complex genre nature; they combine literary writing with lexicographic tasks. A similar case was described by the great English lexicographer Samuel Johnson in the Preface to his “Dictionary of the English Language” of 1755): “...The dreams of the poet were destined at last to awaken the lexicographer.” However, the opposite is also true: the lexicographer’s dreams of an omnipotent, all-encompassing language are allowed to awaken the poet...

The Russian language, as we now know and use it, is only a special case of that superlanguage , or “virtual” Russian, which relates to Russian as the potential relates to the actual. A superlanguage, or hyperlanguage, is a set of parallel worlds of a given language, the space of its lexical and conceptual capabilities, which are not opposed to the existing language, but continue and deepen it, like a three-dimensional panorama extending into the future. Through a projective vocabulary, hyperlanguage is built into the “primary”, “present” language or, more precisely, it completes it into itself.

In essence, there is no available language, as a collection of point facts. According to Wilhelm Humboldt, the founder of linguistics as an independent discipline, “language is not a product of activity (Ergon), but activity (Energeia)... Language is a constantly renewed work of the spirit aimed at making articulated sound suitable for the expression of thought.” . “Language is, as it were, an external manifestation of the spirit of peoples; the language of a people is its spirit, and the spirit of a people is its language, and it is difficult to imagine anything more identical.” [5] The more projective activity there is in a language, the more projective dictionaries are created - different in style and thematic areas - the more the language becomes what it can and is intended to be: not only an accumulator, but also a generator of the spiritual energy of the people.

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* This article was included as a conclusion to my work “Projective Dictionary of the Russian Language. Neology of Time,” in the book. Semiotics and
avant-garde Anthology. Ed.-comp. Yu.S. Stepanov, N.A. Fateeva, V.V. Feshchenko, N.S.
Sirotkin. Под общ. ed. U.S. Stepanova. M.: Academic Project; culture,
2006, ss. 1031-1076.

1. “In Dahl’s Dictionary there are indeed many words (about 14 thousand) that are his new formations.” T. And Vendina. V. I. Dal: a view from the present. Questions of linguistics, 2001, #3, p. 17. The number of neologisms in V. Khlebnikov is of the same order. According to R. Vroon, their number “definitely exceeds ten thousand.” V.P. Grigoriev mentions the number 16 thousand. See Natalya Pertsova. Dictionary of neologisms by Velimir Khlebnikov. Wiener Slavistischer Almanach. Sonderband 40, Wien-Moskau, 1995, pp. 425-26, p. 17.

2. Vladimir Dal. Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language, in 4 vols., M., Olma-press, 2002, vol. 1, pp. 11, 32.

3. V. Khlebnikov. Our basis, in his book. Creations. M., Soviet writer, 1986, p. 624.

4. Allan Metcalf. Predicting. New Words: The Secrets of Their Success. Boston, NY.: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002, p. 168.

5. Wilhelm von Humboldt. Selected works on linguistics. M., "Progress", 2000, pp. 68, 70.

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network project Mikhail Epstein's "The Gift of Words" has been published since April 17, 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 language and public consciousness. "Dar" also conducts discussions about the Russian language, discusses letters and suggestions from readers. “The Gift” can serve as a guide to word creation, an introduction to the world of linguistic fantasies and mental technologies. “The word controls the brain, the brain controls the hands, hands control the kingdoms” (Velimir Khlebnikov).

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