Языковые контакты и словарь

LIETUVIŲ KALBOTYROS KLAUSIMAI, XXVIII (1989) KALBŲ RYŠIAI IR SĄVEIKOS ELENA IVANOVNA CHARIKOVA LANGUAGE CONTACTS AND THE DICTIONARY In the conditions prevailing in our multinational state, where more than one hundred nations and ethnic groups coexist on an equal basis and speak more than one hundred and thirty languages of the peoples of the USSR, language contacts have their own particular features. In contemporary Soviet linguistics, these questions continue to receive close attention; nevertheless, it must be noted that research in this field remains limited in scope. It generally does not extend beyond individual national republics; studies do not encompass different linguistic areas and the country as a whole, where certain linguistic patterns can be observed and where the contact between languages and their speakers is so tangible in connection with the migratory processes of the population of the USSR, as well as the varied ethnic composition of the republics’ populations. There is a clear shortage of generalizing scholarly works in this important field of research, and there is no language forecasting for our country as a whole. To obtain meaningful scholarly results today, questions of language contacts cannot be effectively addressed without taking a comprehensive approach to them. The joint efforts of linguists, psychologists, sociologists, lawyers, economists, historians, and ethnographers directly engaged with this aspect of the problem are needed. Contemporary study of language contact requires investigation of many aspects of our reality directly connected with the historical past of the union republics and the different periods when they became part of the USSR; their cultural and economic development in the past and present; their geographical location in relation to other republics; population density in each individual republic; the proportion of urban and rural populations; and the proportions of different nationalities living there (cf. more than one hundred nationalities live in Bashkiria). In this problem, these aspects of reality are highly important, since contacts among the different peoples of the USSR do not leave their languages unaffected. The problem of language contact is multifaceted; therefore, from a linguistic perspective, clearly distinguishing the principal (linguistic) problems of language contacts from the related (extralinguistic) problems in this field will be of scholarly and practical value for further study. Related problems may primarily include questions 158 that facilitate language contacts: political-economic and sociocultural cooperation among peoples within the USSR. From research and conclusions that are more general in character in this respect, it is necessary to move on to specific cultural-historical and logical-philosophical questions of research; demographic and sociological conclusions concerning ethnic community and language should play a significant role here. The following may be considered principal linguistic problems: the study of language contacts in the domains of literary and colloquial languages and their differentiation; intrastuctural changes in languages in connection with the interaction of elements during contact; borrowings as a result of language contact; questions of the acquisition and assimilation of lexemes through contact; language contacts at the structural levels of languages: at the level of semantic groupings, at the level of the lexeme, at the level of the sememe, at the level of an individual element of a word, and so on. Problems in the linguistic aspect of the study of language contacts should be considered against the background of related problems, but not conflated with them, as this often leads to the leveling of the linguistic perspective and brings the extralinguistic level of research to the fore even when its aims are linguistic. Further work is needed to refine the conceptual framework, given the lack of agreement on the nature of language contacts. The fact that the encyclopedia “Russian Language” (Moscow, 1979) contains no terms such as “language contacts” or “bilingualism,” nor entries on the interaction and mutual influence of the languages of the peoples of the USSR, among others, cannot be overlooked. Questions concerning the entry of words from a donor language into a recipient language through contact—or, more precisely, as a result of their contact—also await a specific scholarly treatment. In this respect, data from dictionaries of the recipient language are of considerable interest to us. Closer examination of why borrowings occur and foreign lexemes enter the system of the recipient language has shown that this aspect of research is very closely connected with questions concerning contact between closely related and unrelated languages and their speakers. It is known that dictionary compilers include the most frequently used portion of borrowed vocabulary in the explanatory dictionaries of the recipient language, and that a foreign-language word in a recipient-language dictionary is classified as borrowed and assimilated. Linguistic literature distinguishes the following terms in connection with borrowing: general problems of borrowing through language contact, borrowed words, and borrowed word elements. Researchers define the term “borrowing” as “a complex linguistic process, the completion of which is the creation of a word new to the language; its essence, which conditions the entire process and leads it to completion, is the phonetic change of the borrowed 159 foreign-language material and giving it grammatical form1. Borrowing is also defined “as the process of transferring words from one language to another”2. Within the framework of the problem of borrowing, this process involves the routes by which foreign vocabulary enters the recipient language (written and spoken), the assimilation and adoption of borrowed vocabulary, its entry into the borrowing language’s lexicon, and so forth. As lexicographic data indicate3, words borrowed from the languages of the USSR’s national republics are represented in the explanatory dictionaries of modern Russian mainly by vocabulary describing household objects and family life, names of representatives of the animal and plant worlds, as well as various phenomena related to culture, religious rites, and other human activities (work, leisure, holidays), etc. Borrowed vocabulary is etymologically heterogeneous, and the reasons for and routes of its entry into Russian vary. The editions we examined show that only a few foreign lexemes from the languages of the peoples of the USSR have secured a firm place in explanatory dictionaries of Russian. But how can we explain the phenomenon whereby some borrowed linguistic units are absent from a work of the USSR Academy of Sciences such as the “Dictionary of the Modern Russian Language” (in 17 volumes), yet appear in others, much smaller in size, for example, in S. I. Ozhegov’s “Dictionary of the Russian Language”? The reason probably lies in the still insufficient scholarly development of important problems in the theory and practice of modern lexicography and, in particular, in that area concerned with the mutual enrichment and interaction of the languages of the peoples of the USSR and the representation of borrowed vocabulary in Russian explanatory dictionaries. In the scholarly literature available on the collection, selection, and systematization of lexical material for dictionaries, we find no principles for selecting words with regard to internal borrowing. It is well known that the composition of a dictionary’s word list depends on the type of dictionary, the aims and objectives of the publication, and its size, as reflected in dictionaries’ introductory articles and in various individual scholarly articles, instructions, and dictionary projects. However, with regard to vocabulary borrowed into Russian from the languages of the USSR’s national republics, we find no information on the question that concerns us in the editions under consideration—this important problem has not yet received due attention, which is precisely why, in this respect, the introductory articles to the dictionaries do not seem particularly significant. An analysis of journal articles concerning lexical borrowings from the languages of the peoples of the USSR 1 Ефремов Л. П. Сущность лексического заимствования и основные признаки заимствованных слов: Автореф. дис. … канд. филол. наук. Алма-Ата, 1959. С. 9. 2 Крысин Л. П. Иноязычные слова в современном русском языке. М., 1968. С. 32—33. 3 Dictionary of the Modern Russian Literary Language: In 17 volumes. Moscow; Leningrad, 1948–1965; Dictionary of the Russian Language: In 4 volumes. Moscow, 1981–1984; Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language / Edited by D. N. Ushakov. Moscow, 1935–1940; Dictionary of the Russian Language / Compiled by S. I. Ozhegov / Edited by N. Yu. Shvedova. 13th ed. Moscow, 1981. 160 published in connection with the release of a particular dictionary and most often describing the experience of its compilers, leads to the conclusion that these questions are neither addressed nor raised in them either. Compiling a national word list is difficult, serious, and responsible work, requiring the dictionary authors to have professional skills and a sense of civic responsibility. Vocabulary that has entered Russian from the languages of the indigenous population living in the territories of the union republics should be represented in a separate card file, compiled according to specially developed lexicographic principles and guidelines, and incorporated as an integral part of the dictionary’s general card file (a kind of dictionary within a dictionary), while simultaneously conforming to the dictionary’s general rules (in terms of its aims and objectives) and not contradicting them. If specially developed rules and methods for compiling the card-file material, as well as principles for defining borrowings, were in place, their quantitative and qualitative representation in explanatory dictionaries of modern Russian would undoubtedly increase. Only in this way can certain results be achieved in lexicographic practice concerning borrowed lexemes at the current stage in the development of language contacts. 11. 678