Living language structure

About the Russian language as an ocean, about how the education and knowledge of the language is related, about what difficulties translators and programmers are faced with, creating translation programs, Julia Cherny talked with Professor Yuri Chatin .

Yuri Vasilievich Shatin - a man in the Novosibirsk Akademgorodok is not just famous, but rather famous. Not only students, graduate students and employees of the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, but also connoisseurs of literature of the XIX century, poets and lovers of poetry know and love him. He teaches at the NSU, the NGPU, the Novosibirsk Independent Institute, the Novosibirsk Theater Institute, the Moscow International Academy of Business and Management, he is the chief researcher at the Literary Management of the Institute of Philology SB RAS, a member of the Russian Society of Iosif Brodsky and the editorial Council of the City Center for Poetry Fans "Tsvetaeva House".

But most of all, not even its performance and a lot of regalia, but the breadth of the horizons are striking. “Remember, at Brodsky ...” he says in passing and quotes some little-known diaries of some little-known Brodsky friend. He casually mentions a huge number of facts, poems, quotes, obviously not realizing that most people in the world are far from so educated ...

At the same time, Yuri Vasilievich assures that in our world a lot depends on education, even ownership of the native language:

- To date, scientists identify four levels of language proficiency. The first level is set by the very fact of existence in the language environment. This level is well characterized by a joke about “one coffee and one bun”. Most Russian -speaking people may not know how to say correctly, “one coffee” or “one”, but they will definitely say “one” about a bun.

The following levels are already directly related to education.

- The second level, style, is the ability to distinguish between different styles of texts and oral speech. Any student answers the exam and talks about this very exam to friends in completely different styles. The French conducted an experiment according to which, after 15 years of study, only 7% of the information heard (and successfully submitted) information remained in his memory. Through this percentage has even less ...

A legal question arises: why study with such a low efficiency?

- In fact, we do not learn knowledge, but different methods of communication. Including the fact that our knowledge can be represented in different style codes, ”explains Yuri Vasilievich.

The third level of language proficiency is studied by rhetoric - this is the ability to think and talk with integral texts. Most often this comes with higher education. The highest level is recognized as the highest - the ability to create your own author, exclusive text. Moreover, exclusivity implies original author's content. About whether it is possible to teach this level, so far there is no consensus.

“My grandson once heard the news how much the“ square of Malevich is approximately cost ”,” explains the features of the fourth level of ownership of the language Shatin. - He immediately invited us to draw the same. But we understand that 12 million is not a black square itself, but its idea.

Possession of the language, of course, is not limited to the correct cases, childbirth, appropriate style. The most important function is understanding.

- The more complicated the text, the more complicated it is understood. When the first computer transferred from English to German and back the phrase “Petya went to the store and bought apples”, the ITSHNIKS FOR ARE ARE REASE. But philologists quickly cooled this joy. They offered the computer for translation the well -known biblical phrase "Where the flesh is offset, the spirit is eternal." The car translated: "The meat rotted and the stench spread." The more complicated the text, the less artificial mind can work with it, ”says Shatin.

Of course, since then it was possible to achieve significant success in machine translation. Programmers have high hopes to work with large amounts of data and training in artificial intelligence based on existing successful translations of literary texts. But Yuri Shatin does not share such hopes ...

- In the literary text, the installation for deautomaticization is initially dominated by the installation. I think that the artistic language is a language with an infinite number of conditions. Moreover, each author finds new meanings that differ from universally recognized standards. This is the artistic language and differs from chess. Therefore, I am sure that we can teach computers to translate, say, instructions for a vacuum cleaner, but not literature.

In 1970, at the Institute of Foreign Languages. Maurice Torez was translated into English from the Russian language and transmitted to translators for reverse translation. The translator translated:

“ Effly shoes shine with varnish / Seven steps to the abyss. Everything was decided / I'm at home now, the dream is no longer varnish / by George is destined for me to sleep now . ” At the same time, the text of the Russian ditties was originally taken: “ Eh, my bast shoes, / four supports! / I want to - I’ll spend the night at home, / I want - at Yegorka! "

But with double translation, the bast shoes turned into shoes, the supports - into the varnish, Yegor into George, and the translator added lyrical on his own ... The researchers did not stop there. They again translated the text into English and let another specialist translate. The ditty turned into “ in these boots, a long way has passed / Volan were dusty to the roots / I want to take a rest / want to rest at home - I spend my friends .” The more we complicate the text, the more traps put our tongue.

- I talked with Bulgarian translators who could not translate the first line "Eugene Onegin": "My uncle of the most honest rules." In Bulgarian, different words for the uncle from the mother and from the father. In Japanese, by the way, there are four of them: the father and younger brother of the father, the eldest and younger brother of the mother. At the same time, for the Japanese, history changes dramatically depending on who we are talking about - about her father’s younger brother or older brother.

Sometimes these traps are used for manipulative purposes. Yuri Vasilievich cited a rather harmless example of such use.

- 14 years ago, one Frenchman gave an announcement in which he promised to tell in just 2 euros how to keep his hair for a long time. He earned 200 thousand euros on this and answered everyone the same way: "Keep them in a plastic bag." So it is important not to become a victim of letters. The communicative environment makes us make a choice not only linguistic, but also ethical.

The language, of course, the structure is alive, subject to changes. And the further we go down the chronology, the more essential these changes.

- If a hundred years ago they said: “I will certainly come to the theater,” now - “I will definitely come.” For us, these phrases remain synonymous, and a hundred years ago “I will definitely come” the viewer, only an actor, a controller or a stage worker could not say. In the 1950s, it was customary to mitigate the consonants in the words of [Lyud'mila], [Confet], [z'iere], [d'VER], etc. Already in the 1960s these sounds ceased to soften. Usually these changes for native speakers are not
noticeable. But if we listen to the texts of a hundred years, and even more so ten years ago, then the changes will become obvious. One hundred years ago, it was impossible to say “they” about the two women - only “One” (“And they envy One / Sovereign’s wife”), and today, on the VGTRK channel, journalists say “in both wards of the Legislative Assembly”.

And the deeper we go down the chronological ladder, the more significant the difference. Say, 800 years ago there were two remarkable words - “bull” and “Bchela”, Yin and Yang in Slavic mythology. The bull remained a bull, and Bchela turned into a bee ...

Philologists calculated that if the speed of changing the language remains the same, then after 833 the Russian language awaits cardinal changes. And this means that in 900 years descendants will no longer understand our current language. Should I resist the changes in Russian? Is it time to panic already?

“I compare the Russian language with the ocean, where we can draw water with a bucket all our lives and the ocean will not even notice this,” my interlocutor reassures. - In the Russian dictionary of Ozhegov, 450 thousand words, in Pushkin’s dictionary - 4 thousand. That is, Pushkin needed only one thousandth of Russian words to say everything that he said ...

Changes in the language occur daily and hourly. But cardinal changes are extremely rare. Of course, phonetics changes faster than grammar. Nevertheless, Yuri Shatin suggests that in 70 years in Russian there will be no more than 6 cases, but 3-4. Even now, three cases coincide in the creative case: the Complex comparative (“Walk Gogol”, “seem Pushkin”), the creative active (“The book is written by the writer”), the instrumental instrumental (“The book is written with a pen”). So in modern Russian there are more functions than cases.

In many Indo -European languages, childbirth is erased. Shatin also implies this opportunity for the generic endings of common names in Russian: “In the next 100-150 years, I think, the middle gender will disappear, partially combined with the male, partly with the female. Transformations lead to the fact that the birth endings will disappear. The manifestations of this can already be observed on numerals and pronouns. ”

The poet Shatin is simply impossible not to ask about trends in modern Russian poetry.

-Firstly, the difference between the objective and subjective world is erased. Secondly, there is a conceptualization-the displacement of an artistic image with a certain concept. As an example, I will give the stanza of Alexander Eremenko:

Burning, alcohol looks like a pioneer
Which is worried when
In front of the bonfire, burning with shame,
Tails a tie for fitting.

To the question about geniuses in modern poetry, the professor chose not to answer:

- It is always difficult for contemporaries to judge their poets: the consciousness of the layman lags behind poetry. And you need to have a special super -carrier that allows you to hear. That is why I am afraid to judge the poetry of the 21st century, about the poetry of the 20–25-year-olds.