Translated material
Mikhail Epstein. Gift of words
Introduction
...The word controls the brain, the brain controls the hands,
hands - kingdoms.
Velimir Khlebnikov
There are many different types of dictionaries: explanatory and encyclopedic, etymological and spelling, dialect and individual, dictionaries of historicisms and neologisms... But they all describe words that were already in use and, to one degree or another, entered the language.
The peculiarity of a projective dictionary is that it describes previously unknown words that are offered for use for the first time . If a traditional dictionary sums up the existence of a word in a language, then in a projective dictionary the life of a word is just beginning . From here it can go into the texts of other authors, become a fact of language, or it can remain in the dictionary. Words have their own destiny...
1.
In the 19th century, the Russian language space quickly filled up. V. Dahl's dictionary is bursting with an abundance of words, although even then they were already directed more to the past than to the future: to ancient crafts, crafts, things of homespun life. But also moral and mental phenomena are presented abundantly: there are few roots, but so many derivatives, for one root “good” - about 200 words!
However, in the 20th century. the tongue began to decline, four or five times, if not more, its crown thinned out, the forest forest became bald, and black stumps remained from many of the roots. The most alarming thing is that the original Russian roots in the 20th century slowed down and even stopped growing, and many branches were cut down. Dahl lists about 150 words in the root nest “-love-”, from “ to be loved ” to “ lovingly generous ”, from “ lyubushka ” to “ fornication ” (this does not include prefixes). The four-volume Academic Dictionary of 1982 contains 41 words. It turns out that for a hundred years the root “lyub” not only did not produce growth or new branches, but, on the contrary, began to sharply wither and lose its crown.
In the 1990s There is, of course, a rapid update of the vocabulary , but mainly due to two sources: (1) borrowings from the English language and (2) an attack on the language of criminal gangster vocabulary and phraseology, slang and colloquial bases of the language that have entered journalism, journalism , literature, having made for themselves the same “golden-mouthed” career as their golden-toothed carriers.
All dictionaries of the Russian language of the Soviet era contain a total of about 125 thousand words - this is very little for a developed language with a great literary past and potential. The same thing happens to language as to population. The population of Russia is almost three times less than what it should have been according to demographic estimates at the beginning of the 20th century. And it’s not just a matter of population decline, but also a shortage of crops. 60 or 70 million died as a result of historical experiments and disasters, but twice as many of those who could have been born, demographically, should have been born - were not born, their social environment did not accept them from those genetic depths from which they were eager to be born. This is how it is in the Russian language: not only is there a decline , but also a shortage .
Dalev's words cannot be restored in the language, because many are associated with a range of outdated or local meanings; but in a living language, the roots must grow, branch, and bring new words. It is significant that A. Solzhenitsyn , who in his “ Russian Dictionary of Language Expansion ” tries to expand the modern Russian language by introducing words from V. Dahl, is forced to sharply shorten it, not only thin out Dahl’s dictionary, but also narrow the meanings and interpretations of words. “The best way to enrich a language is to restore previously accumulated and then lost wealth,” writes Solzhenitsyn in the preface to his “Dictionary.” 1 Although Solzhenitsyn’s attempt deserves great respect, it is now clearer than ever before that language cannot live on memory and recollection alone. To answer the challenge of time, language needs imagination , the ability to create new words and concepts , not limited only to restoring one’s past or borrowing from other languages. A language is alive as long as its ancient roots continue to branch and bear fruit in new words. It is not enough to use language as an instrument of artistic or scientific creativity; is necessary a creative renewal of the language itself .
2.
“The Gift of Speech” is dedicated to this task: the reader is offered words, terms, concepts that may enter into general use and become signs of new ideas, scientific theories, artistic movements, styles of life and thinking... Or they may not. It depends on the readers themselves how “ accessible ” these words will be and how “ realizable ” are the images and ideas that they bring with them. “It is not possible for us to predict how our word will respond,” - in this case, Tyutchev’s expression should be taken literally. Nothing can be imposed on a language, but something can be offered - in the hope that not everything proposed will be rejected.
Readers may ask - and I myself ask myself: why does the language need an influx of newly formed words? What is this - a literary game? Let such word creation have a place in poetry, but why does society, the country, and all native speakers need it?
The future can be described in a variety of genres: fortune telling, prophecy, apocalypse, utopia or dystopia, political or aesthetic manifesto, scientific hypothesis, science fiction novel or film... But the most economical, so to speak, minimal genre of describing the future is a new word , neologism . It not only describes a possible future, but creates this possibility itself , since it expands the scope of meanings operating in language . And what is in the tongue is in the mind; What’s on the mind is what’s in action. A single word is the germ of new theories and practices, just as a single seed contains myriads of future plants.
Here I want to refer to Roman Jakobson , who discovered an amazing commonality between the genetic program for the development of the organism and the linguistic program for the development of culture and society: “...Now on the agenda is the consideration of the temporary, programming role of language as a bridge spanning from the past to the future. Interesting. , that the famous Russian specialist in biomechanics N.A. Bernstein in 1966, in the conclusion to his book, successfully compared the “codes imprinted in DNA and RNA molecules” (which reflect “the processes of upcoming development and growth”) with “speech as psychobiological and psychosocial structure" providing a preliminary model of the future." 2
This idea about the programming role of language is especially relevant in connection with the recent emergence of a new discipline based on genetics - memetics , which can be defined as cultural genetics . “Memes” are units of meaning or information that are transmitted from consciousness to consciousness through words, images, musical phrases, and popular expressions. 3 Memes are semantic genes or viruses, transmitters of cultural rather than biological information. Examples of such memes include frequently repeated phrases, slogans, musical motifs, fashions, recipes, mathematical formulas, computer algorithms, instructions for the production and use of certain objects and tools. In fact, the entire history of mankind can be described as the evolution of memes, their struggle for survival, distribution, conquest of minds, and introduction into spiritual and material culture. Religions, ideologies, political systems, philosophical and artistic movements, ideological debates and everyday conversations are all considered by memetics as forms of grandiose action in which countless hordes of memes fight for possession of the sign universe. From the same point of view, “the function of language is the spread of memes.” 4
It is obvious that different levels of language have different abilities of reproduction, “replicatability”. The undisputed champion among language memes is a single word. Actually, the word is the main meme , the most infectious of all “infoviruses,” or, better said, the most prolific of all infogens . Traveling from consciousness to consciousness, the word plants there the roots of future thoughts and deeds. It multiplies much faster than a sentence or text. Even phraseological units, aphorisms, and catchphrases are not reproduced as often and universally as a lexical unit of a language. The most popular text, printed in millions of copies, still cannot be compared in frequency with words that are repeated many times in all texts in a given language. A new word is a mini-meme; it has the greatest energy of promotion, since the minimum of the sign accounts for the maximum of the meaning.
3.
There are three types of activities in the field of signs and words: sign-combination , sign-descriptive and sign-creative . The overwhelming majority of all texts, everything written and said belongs to the first type. And Pushkin , and Dostoevsky , and a statesman, and a drunken drunkard - they all combine words in their own way, although the number of these words and the ways of combining them in literature, politics, and colloquial speech are very different. Grammar, dictionaries, linguistic research and textbooks, which describe words and the laws of their combination, already belong to the second type of sign activity, descriptive; This is no longer a language of the first, object level, but what is called a metalanguage, a second-order language.
The third type is the rarest: it is not the use or description of signs that already exist in the language, but the introduction of new signs into it: neology, sign creation, semiurgy . Semiurgy includes many elements of V. Dahl’s vocabulary, a significant part of the work of V. Khlebnikov and a smaller part of A. Bely and V. Mayakovsky , but in general this third type of sign activity is still in the embryonic stage of development.
There is a prejudice that the creation of new signs, new units of language is a collective, nameless, conciliar process, that only an entire people can act as the subject of word creation. This is true (and then only partly) in relation to a certain era of language development, which may now be coming to an end. Once upon a time there was no individual literary creativity, songs and fairy tales were passed on from mouth to mouth, and then, with the advent of writing, individual authors of literary works appeared. In the same way, now, with the transition to electronic literature, the folklore era in the life of the language is ending , words will have more and more individual authors.
Actually, in previous eras, individual word creation was an important factor in the enrichment of the language. M.V. Lomonosov introduced words such as “pendulum, pump, attraction, constellation, mine, drawing”; N.M. Karamzin - “industry, love, absent-mindedness, touching, future, public, humanity, generally useful, achievable, improve.” From A. Shishkov came the words “fable” and “actor”, from F. Dostoevsky - “to shy away”, from K. Bryullov - “gag”, from V. Khlebnikov - “ladomir”, from I. Severyanin - “mediocrity”, from A. Solzhenitsyn - “education”...
But before the creation of the Internet, it was difficult to trace the origins of new words, to record who first began to use them and in what meaning. With the advent of the Internet, this is done by simply pressing a key in the search engine. On the other hand, the Internet makes it possible to instantly spread a new word among a huge number of readers. The new growth can be picked up on the fly, and its success can be easily tracked by the growing number of uses from year to year and even from month to month. It is the transparency of the Internet in terms of reading and permeability in terms of writing that makes it an ideal environment for tracking and disseminating new verbal, and even graphic, pictorial signs. The Internet does to language what writing once did to literature: it transforms it from folklore into the realm of individual creativity.
It can be assumed that sign givers will eventually play no less a role in society than legislators. These are two additional types of activity, because the law subjects everyone to the general need for self-restraint, and the new sign creates for everyone a new opportunity for self-expression. We also need a corresponding science that would deal with methods of creating new signs. Semiotics is usually divided into three sections: semantics (the relationship of sign to meaning and signified), syntactics (the relationship between signs), and pragmatics (the relationship between signs and users). But there is no special section dedicated to the creation of new signs, i.e. the relationship between signs and the absence of them, semiotic zero, sign vacuum . One could call this section of semiotics “ semionics ” (as in “bionics, electronics, socionics, culturonics”). Semiurgy is the activity of creating new signs; semionics is the science of creating new signs, the fourth main section of semiotics. 5
4.
Sign creation and word creation are not just the creation of new signs and words. With each new word, a new meaning appears, and the possibility of new understanding and action. We feel and act according to the meaning of words. We ask ourselves: “Is this love or not love? Or maybe what we are experiencing could more accurately be called pity, or friendship, or lust, or respect, or gratitude? - and having chosen the exact word for our feelings, we act in in accordance with this word: getting married or getting divorced, dating or breaking up, declaring love or dislike. In the Greek language there were about a dozen words denoting different types and shades of love, some of which we still use today (“eros”, “mania”, “ philia", "agape"). And in Russian (and in many other European languages) there is only "love" for everything: for the homeland, and for ice cream, and for a woman... With new formations from the same root, refracting it through the semantic prism of other suffixes: “love” or “lyublya” (which will be included in the Projective Dictionary) - not only a new layer of meanings appears in the language, but also a new shade in the spectrum of feelings, actions, intentions...
Let us remember the colossal impact the Soviet ideological language had on the life of our society and the whole world. It would seem that they were just empty shocks of air, but they were used to build the giants of the social industry, public utilities and apartments, the system of detection and punishment, five-year plans, weekdays and holidays, labor discipline, the morals of the party and industrial environment... Needless to say about the role of words in that era - but this was not an overestimation of the role of the word, but rather an underestimation of the words themselves, which were reduced to ideologeme spells, with the root and meaning killed, which was not subject to understanding and discussion, but only to execution. In post-Soviet society, ideologemes should be replaced by free root words, which can provide scope for meaning-making in actions. Culture desperately needs words with clear roots and multiple derivatives so that it can understand itself - and at the same time become more complex, refined, and branch its meanings from living roots in all directions.
In essence, lexicology is the only ideology of our time that provides meaning to the existence of the people and the relationship between the past and the future. Language is the only thing that feeds consciousness with universal meanings and makes fellow citizens understandable to each other. Not what is said in the language, but the language itself. Not texts or even sentences, but words and morphemes. Eternal, unsurpassed “peace”, “gift”, “blood”, “love”, “thought”, “on-”, “on-”, “and”, “-stv”, “-ov”, “-enie” "... Already on sentences we disagree, but at the level of texts misunderstanding, suspicion, and social battles begin.
It is unlikely that any political, or philosophical, or religious ideology can unite society these days. Where a unifying idea is put forward, i.e. a value judgment with a claim to universality, division begins there. Meaning-forming unity is given not in an idea, but in a language , and then only on the condition that this language develops, that its crown does not thin out and its roots do not rot. Lexicology is not only the discipline of studying and describing the vocabulary of a language, but also the scientific basis for its replenishment, what can be called “ lexiconics ,” or creative word formation , which expands the primary area of meanings available to a given culture and all its speakers. Philology not only loves and studies words, but also extracts from them the opportunity for new thought and action; By expanding the language stock of a culture, it changes its gene pool, manner of thinking and acting.
* * *
So, the main theme of this project is the art of creating new words and concepts, ways to update the vocabulary and grammar of the Russian language, the development of the root system, and the expansion of word formation models. " The Gift of the Word " is a dictionary of the lexical and conceptual capabilities of the Russian language , the prospects for its development in the 21st century. 6 The peculiarity of the project is that not a single one of the proposed words is in any of the existing dictionaries (rare exceptions are specifically stated). Each word is given to readers for free use; it can become the password and mantra of the coming week (“The Gift” will be published on Mondays), the subject of further reflection and literary creativity.
All illustrative material is indented from the left edge of the page, and new words introduced for the first time are highlighted in bold . In each headword (and where necessary by meaning, and in example texts), the stressed vowel is highlighted with a capital letter.
All speech examples in the Dictionary belong to the author-compiler, but he is as far from the opinions expressed in the Dictionary as a novelist is from the statements of his heroes. The task of the Dictionary is to present as widely as possible a variety of contexts and situations of possible use of a given word, and not to express certain views or share experiences. Speech simulacra are designed to demonstrate the full range of possible uses of new words:
-from scientific to everyday life;
-from religious-apocalyptic to newspaper-journalistic;
-from realistic and avant-garde prose to folk ditties;
-from a philosophical treatise to a school essay.
It is up to the reader to judge to what extent these typical quotations reproduce certain styles of modern writing and thinking. It is not always possible to clearly draw the line between statements that are always your own (in terms of composition) and often not your own (in terms of content). Such is the flickering aesthetics of the dictionary, where the distance between the author and those whose virtual speech he records either lengthens or shortens.
For a genre such as a dictionary, feedback from readers is even more important than for a poem or novel. No one expects readers to speak the language of the poem, but any dictionary project, and especially one associated with the development of vocabulary, with the renewal of language, makes sense only insofar as these words are either already used, or can be accepted, thought out and introduced into the language. Therefore, I will welcome letters from readers with reviews of published words, an assessment of their applicability, indicating new possible meanings, contexts, and examples of use.
Please write to Mikhail Naumovich Epshtein at russmne@emory.edu, in KOI-8 encoding, indicating dar as the subject.
We begin the publication of "The Gift" in Russian Journal with a short dictionary entry devoted to this genre itself - the word as an independent work.
Issue 1.
one-word - the shortest genre of literature, the art of one word, containing a new idea or picture. If the aphorism genre corresponds to the sentence as a linguistic unit, then the one-word genre corresponds to the minimum unit of language - the word. A one-word word as an author's work differs from a neologism, which has a functional, applied, technical, terminological meaning.
Examples of one-word words :
Poetic: “Creator” by Velimir Khlebnikov.
Satirical: “bungler” by M. Saltykov-Shchedrin.
Skazovoe: “small scope” by Nikolai Leskov.
Journalistic "education" of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Philosophical: Mikhail Bakhtin’s “out-of-placeness”.
Derivatives:
monologue - a writer of monologues.
odnoslovit - to compose one-word words.
Examples of use:
Velimir Khlebnikov is the greatest one-word man among Russian poets.
When our friend tries to speak one word , ugly words are born. If brevity is the sister of talent, then too close a relationship between them leads to incest.
Until now, it was believed that there are only three words in the language that completely describe themselves. These are the word "word", the term "term" and the noun "noun". Now this shortest list of self-meaning linguistic units can be increased by adding to it the one-word “ single-word ”. 7
Notes:
1 Russian language extension dictionary. Compiled by A.I. Solzhenitsyn. M., Nauka, 1990, p. 3.
2 Roman Yakobson. Linguistics in its relation to other sciences, in his book. Selected works. M., Progress, 1985, p. 395. N.A. Bernshtein cit. according to his book. Essays on the physiology of movements and physiology of activity. M., 1966, p. 334.
3 The term "meme" was proposed by the English biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976, in his book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins argued that along with genes as carriers of biological information, there are carriers of cultural information that are also prone to spontaneous reproduction and obey the laws of Darwinian evolution. By analogy with genes, Dawkins called “memes” these units of cultural memory that strive for endless self-reproduction and use books, songs, plays, television shows, mass media for this purpose...
4 Susan Blackmore. The Meme Machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p.99.
5 I scoured the web for combinations such as “the art of creating new signs”, “the science of creating new signs”, “creation of new signs”, “art of creating new signs”, and found practically NOTHING. The word "semionics" does not exist either in Russian or in European languages. The word “semiurgy”, absent in Russian, is used occasionally by Jean Baudrillard and in postmodern communication theory - but in a very general, not special meaning of “sign activity”, “production and reproduction of signs”, which includes both sign-combination and sign-descriptive - any semiotic activity (see semiurgy ).
6 “The Gift of the Word” has been published weekly since April 2000 in the form of a network mailing list to friends and colleagues, and then to a circle of subscribers .
7 For more information about word creation and the one-word genre, see M.N. Epshtein, “ The Word as a Work. About the one-word genre ,” “ New World ,” #9, 2000, pp. 204-215. Full version of this article (magazine " Continent ", #104, 2000, pp. 279-313.)