LIETUVIŲ KALBOTYROS KLAUSIMAI, XXVIII (1989)

KALBŲ RYŠIAI IR SĄVEIKOS

VYACHESLAV MIKHAILOVICH PANKIN

LEXICAL DIFFUSION

The very concept of “interethnic communication” within the structure of social relations characteristic of the Soviet multinational society functions as a sociolinguistic category. Interethnic communication is a necessary condition for strengthening and developing the durable economic union of the Soviet republics and for carrying out economic, political, social, cultural, and other ties among the country’s nations and nationalities. These ties take the form of intensive interaction and determine the intensity of interethnic communication.

The intensity of interethnic communication and the accompanying processes of internationalization are evident today in all areas of Soviet people’s lives—industrial, socio-political, scientific, artistic, physical education and sports, tourism, and so forth. The intensity of interethnic communication, whatever the sphere in which it takes place, is expressed above all in the densification of direct linguistic contacts between the language of interethnic communication—Russian—and the national languages. But human communication as such and, of course, interethnic communication ultimately take place through the personal (more precisely, individual) relations of people connected by direct contacts. In an act of interethnic verbal communication, whatever language it is conducted in, we are dealing with two people of different nationalities, with distinct, if one may put it this way, specific traits of national character, bearers of different languages, psychologies, cultures, traditions, and so forth. The internationalization of the Soviet way of life by no means presupposes the disappearance of what is nationally specific. In the light of V. I. Lenin’s teaching, the international is not without national character. Soviet philosophers and sociologists note that “internationalization not only does not lead to the leveling of all attributes of the national, or to the elimination of historically formed ways of life of one people or another, its progressive customs and traditions, but, on the contrary, liberates all the nation’s potential and creates the necessary conditions for the comprehensive expression of the national” (see: The International and the National in the Socialist Way of Life of the Soviet People 1985, 191), and that “the process of internationalization in most spheres of our society’s life is accompanied by the growth of national self-consciousness” (Bromley

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1987, 3) on the basis of the economic, social, and cultural progress of the Soviet nations.

The densification of direct linguistic contacts amid intensive interethnic communication in the contemporary period of the Russian language’s functioning stimulates the increased penetration of lexical units into Russian as it is used in speech at the level of interethnic communication. Observations of the processes by which lexical units from national languages enter Russian at the level of interethnic communication have led us to conclude that each language in contact with Russian contains a certain stratum of distinctive, texture-rich vocabulary that can function in Russian while remaining outside its system, serving at the same time as a linguistic means of expressing national color. We call such vocabulary diffusion vocabulary, and we call the process by which it enters Russian amid intensive interethnic communication and the densification of linguistic contacts between national languages and Russian lexical diffusion (by analogy with the use of this term in physics). In Aibek’s book “The Great Road” (M., 1980), 150 Uzbek diffusion lexemes alone were found in 60 pp.: бейты ‘couplets’, насвай ‘chewing tobacco’, минман-хана ‘the men’s half of a house’, сачнапук ‘an ornament made of thick black silk threads with silver bells and tassels at the ends’, and so on. In Sh. Beishenaliev’s novella “Kychan” (M., 1959), there are more than 150 instances of diffusion Kyrgyz words in 175 pp.: Тулпар ‘a legendary horse’, молдо ‘mullah, religious figure’, сагадалы (an affectionate form of address to children), and so forth. The phenomenon of diffusion can be observed in any Russian text aimed at depicting national or foreign particularities. For example, in an essay by V. Korotich (Ogonyok, 1987, No. 35) there are about 30 diffusion Chinese lexemes: Гузун ‘winter palace’, му ‘a unit of area, approximately 0.14 hectares’, юань ‘monetary unit’, маотай ‘a drink’, and so on. A. Borovik’s essay “Let’s Meet at the Three Cranes” (Ogonyok, 1987, No. 30) likewise contains a large number of diffusion Afghan lexemes such as Хвар ‘river’, моджахед ‘guide’, and so forth, as well as diffusion words that have been assimilated into Russian and are classified as borrowings—кишлак, сура, чадра, мулла, and others.

The presence in Russian speech of lexical units from another language is explained, one way or another, by linguistic contacts, whether direct (immediate) or indirect (mediated). In either case, however, the penetration of lexical units from the language in contact does not occur by itself, but through people communicating with one another; it passes through the creative consciousness of an individual—a bilingual writer, journalist, translator (or simply someone with some knowledge of a second language).

Penetration, of course, does not mean that new lexemes become established in the language in contact, in its lexical system and dictionary—that is, its common vocabulary. Such establishment requires certain conditions, a real need for naming perceived in social language practice, and the presence in the lexical-semantic system of a lacuna or an available-

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…of a cell ready to accommodate new meanings, a new concept, new information for the borrowing language.

A bilingual does not resort to using words from their native language in Russian speech by chance; they are, as it were, borrowing from their native language “those concepts or their nuances, that coloring, in short, which seem necessary to them for some reason” (Щерба 1974, 69). For example, when a bilingual Uzbek uses such words from their native language as шайтан, адыры, дастархан, Мамурджан, хоп! in colloquial Russian, linguistic intuition tells them that these are not quite identical to the Russian черт, холмы, скатерть (стол), Мамурдчик, ладно (хорошо)! The two conceptual-significative semasiological systems of the two languages coexist in the bilingual’s consciousness; in the process of lexical diffusion, they are, as it were, brought into balance and aligned, and thought finds an adequate verbal expression. The abundant diffusion in the spontaneous Russian speech of a bilingual population can also be explained by linguistic deficiency, by the limited Russian lexicon of people of non-Russian ethnicity, by not knowing the precise meaning of a particular Russian word (“which is on the tip of one’s tongue”), and by the principle of economy in the use of linguistic means.

As a result of lexical diffusion, a vast quantity of so-called regionally and locally marked vocabulary enters the Russian lexicon at the level of interethnic communication; most of these units remain unknown to standard Russian.

Over the past decade, interesting works have appeared in Russian linguistics that attempt to collect such diffusion vocabulary from individual linguistic regions in the form of distinctive glossaries, lists, and dictionaries (see: Гальченко, 1975; Назаров, 1984).

The documentation of diffusion vocabulary, the study of its functioning, and the identification of its connotative specificity are, of course, an important part of research into language-contact issues and the processes of mutual influence and enrichment among the languages, literatures, and cultures of the peoples of the USSR. Diffusion vocabulary contains information about the culturally specific heritage of a particular people in our multinational country; it helps illuminate the history of both large and small peoples from a retrospective perspective and objectively assess the socialist transformation of their lives.

Linguists do not yet have sufficient grounds to consider such diffusion words as, for example, уста, дарья, мураб, „Мирани“, яганы, косы (касы) and many others to be borrowings, since they do not meet the parameters and criteria that scholars put forward as a linguistic “mandate” for recognizing them as an integral part of the Russian literary lexicon (see: Крысин 1968, 49; Денисов 1980, 108). The term exoticism, when applied to this kind of vocabulary, is clearly outdated, since the designation “exotic vocabulary” was used in the past, when the real life of the non-Russian peoples belonging to Russia (their everyday life, traditions, and culture) was viewed from its center through a romantic lens as something distant and strange.

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Most diffusion lexemes have no potential to become borrowings, although they offer themselves to the Russian lexical system; to become a borrowing, a word must not only be linguistically adapted but also psychologically assimilated by the Russian linguistic consciousness. This is confirmed by the fact that many diffusion lexemes, despite some adaptation, for instance at the graphemic-phonological level, do not display regularity of grammatical meanings (the principal feature of categoriality) (see: Супрун 1975, 10) or regularity in the lexicon, which manifests itself both in the lexical-semantic sphere and at the semantic-paradigmatic level (Шмелев 1966, 10, 11). Diffusion words (not fully assimilated by Russian) are characterized by paradigmatic indeterminacy and dependence on context; grammatically, Russian speakers generally do not form diminutive nouns from such words—one of the indicators of regularity, and so on.

In Russian-language fiction by national authors, as well as in Russian-language journalism and other literary genres (popular-science essays, travel notes, etc.) specifically oriented thematically toward describing the life and everyday practices of a particular ethnographic region of the country, each item in the diffusion-vocabulary set—whether the result of direct language contact (a bilingual author) or indirect contact (a translator)—not only serves as a linguistic means of expressing national character, but also, as it were, represents the interests of its native language; that is, it acquaints the Soviet reader with those national words that most clearly express the “spirit” of the language and emphasize its popular foundation—in other words, they perform the native language’s metalinguistic function in Russian. Diffusion lexical units have a number of specific features: when used in a Russian context, they require particular methods of semantic explication, such as authorial notes, explanations using Russian words, and so on (cf.: Каранаром, то есть черным наром он прозывался неспроста. — Ч. Айтматов. Буранный полустанок). Diffusion lexemes used in a Russian text enter into specific collocational relations of selectivity with Russian words, for example: зинданы dark, кошма soft, саукале tall, джайляу mountainous, кене-чеке black, and so on, forming fixed collocations (attested in various works by different bilingual authors). Diffusion vocabulary has one important characteristic: it is transient. Inserted into a Russian literary text as a necessary, and sometimes clearly superfluous, means of conveying what is culturally specific, it does not remain in the active vocabulary, in the “center” of the common Russian lexicon, but returns to the contact environment or directly to the “memory” of the native language (national lexical archaisms).

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The study of lexical diffusion in the contact between Russian and the languages of the peoples of the USSR is highly relevant and timely, since it provides researchers with a key to resolving a number of problems essential to the theory of Russian as a means of interethnic communication.

ЛИТЕРАТУРА

Бромлей Ю. Национальные процессы в СССР: достижения и проблемы // Правда. 1987. 13 февр.

Гальченко И. Е. Глоссарий лексики языков народов Северного Кавказа в русском языке. Орджоникидзе, 1975.

Денисов П. Н. Лексика русского языка и принципы ее описания. М., 1980.

Интернациональное и национальное в социалистическом образе жизни советского народа. М., 1985.

Крысин Л. И. Иноязычные слова в русском языке. М., 1968.

Назаров О. Туркменские слова в русском языке. Ашхабад, 1984.

Супрун А. Е. Лексическая система и методы ее изучения // Методы изучения лексики. Минск, 1975.

Шмелев Д. Н. Лексико-семантические изменения в современном русском языке // РЯНШ, 1966, № 3.

Щерба Л. В. О понятии смешения языков // Щерба Л. В. Языковая система и речевая деятельность. М., 1974.