Words play a crucial role in human life and society. They help express thoughts and emotions, describe phenomena and objects, communicate and transmit information. The modern world is incredibly volatile, so the enrichment of the vocabulary of the language is ongoing. Words appear that signify new phenomena and things. Other words change, become obsolete or disappear altogether.
Vocabulary: definition of the term
Vocabulary, or the vocabulary of a language, is the entire collection of words in a given language. It refers to any existing word, even very rarely used. The term “vocabulary” can also be applied to a variety of language (for example, book vocabulary), a writer (Dostoevsky’s vocabulary), a work (vocabulary “Eugene Onegin”), or any person (the lecturer has rich vocabulary). The formation of the vocabulary of a language is a complex, continuous and lengthy process. The study of vocabulary involved in lexicology and lexicography.
Lexicology
From Greek, “lexicology” literally translates as “the science of the word.” This scientific discipline studies the vocabulary of a language. The object of consideration is the word as a significant lexical unit. Lexicologists find out the meaning and characteristics of certain words, their place in the linguistic system, origin and stylistic coloring. The science of the vocabulary of the language analyzes and describes the laws of archaization and updating the lexical system.
Lexicography
Lexicography is a special section of linguistics that deals with the compilation and study of a variety of dictionaries. The value of such benefits is difficult to overestimate, because they not only allow people to master the language deeper, but also accumulate the vocabulary of the language. This helps to systematize the language system and vocabulary.
Writing dictionaries is a useful but very hard work. Authors spend decades creating them. For example, Vladimir Dal has been working on his famous explanatory dictionary for more than 50 years, which includes about 200,000 words and about 30,000 sayings and proverbs. Lexicography is an important science that studies the vocabulary of a language; it allows you to visually observe the transformation of words, changes in their interpretations and meanings, tracks the appearance of new lexical units and the disappearance of obsolete ones.
Classification
All words included in the vocabulary of a language can be classified according to three characteristics.
- By origin: native Russian, Old Slavonic, borrowed.
- By field of use: commonly used and with limited use.
- By frequency of use: active and passive vocabulary.
Russian words
Original Russian words make up approximately 90% of the total vocabulary of the language. These words can be divided into historical layers according to the time when they came and became entrenched in the Russian language.
- The oldest, deepest layer is the Indo-European language, which is considered the forerunner of all Slavic and most European languages. Exact periodization does not exist; many scholars admit that they spoke pre-Indo-European about eight thousand years ago. From this ancient language, such words as a daughter, a birch, a mother, a son, coal, salt, the moon, an oak, a shore, water, came and are preserved in Russian .
- General Slavic or Proto-Slavic - dates from the sixth century AD. Examples of words: gold, night, fox, head, side, frost, brow, court, faith, pumpkin, finger, apple, tribe, summer, poplar, snow, day, pit, ford, cute, stupid, one, five, one hundred .
- Common Eastern Slavic or Old Russian stratum - covers the period from the sixth to fourteenth century and includes words that are not found in the southern and western Slavs. Examples: ice, snow, guy, talker, buckwheat, jackdaw, uncle, cat, tornado, bullfinch.
- Actually Russian words, which serve as the basis for the vocabulary of the language, it is they that determine the specifics and characteristics of modern vocabulary. This time layer began after the fourteenth century and continues now. Examples: baby, getting lost, cucumber, grandmother, trick, dull, canary, lilac, strawberry, dandelion, chicken, cloudy, butterfly.
Old Slavs
A special group of words that came into the Russian language from liturgical books during the spread of Orthodoxy in Russia. The main sources for borrowing were Greek church texts, translated by Cyril and Methodius in the eleventh century. Many of these words have survived to the present time: power, youth, enemy, god, equal, priest, grace, lord, sweet, cross.
Borrowed words
Mastered or borrowed are words that came into Russian vocabulary from foreign languages. They make up about a tenth of the vocabulary of the Russian language. These words have completely settled down in the initially foreign language environment and now obey all the rules of Russian grammar, are transmitted using phonetic and graphic means of the Russian language, have a stable meaning and are actively used in various fields of human knowledge and activity.
Borrowing took place as a result of various economic, military, political, cultural relations between Russia and other states. The mastered words became synonyms for already existing Russian words or supplanted them. The Polish, English, German, Italian, Greek, French, Turkic, Dutch and Latin languages had a particularly great influence on Russian vocabulary. Examples: saber, clown, square, verse, tea, canister, film, fair, orange, rocket, shark, zenith, fiesta, postulate, backpack, ottoman, driver, case, office, welter, table, tomato, firm, fakir, arsenal, kefir, oval, peat, sandals, locomotive.
Common and restricted words
Commonly used words are those that are used and understood by native speakers of the Russian language without territorial, professional, or social restrictions. They include: most nouns ( summer, snow, game, fire, table, soup), verbs ( run, breathe, do, write, glow), adjectives ( blue, close, right, English, spring, joyful), adverbs ( painful, embarrassing, understandable, beautiful, sweet), almost all pronouns, numerals and service parts of Russian speech.
Words with limited use are mainly found in a particular area or are used in separate social groups, united by common interests, profession, occupation. They can be divided into the following categories:
1. Terms. Used to accurately interpret the meaning of certain phenomena and concepts. The terms are characterized by unambiguity and a complete lack of expressive-emotional coloring. Examples:
- Music: baker, fugue, minor tone, overture, dominant.
- Mathematics: differential, cosine, hyperbola, percent, integral.
- Medicine: epicrisis, angina pectoris, medical history, injection, laparoscopy.
- Construction: adhesion, aerated concrete, screed, trowel, theodolite.
2. Dialectisms. Mostly used by residents of a certain area, beyond which they rarely go. Examples:
- Bryansk region: kumarit (dozing or sleeping), guyo (mess).
- Irkutsk region: buragozit (conflict), forks (cabbage swing).
- Volgograd region: rastyka (awkward person), cooler (hair gathered in a bun).
- Primorye: rub in (buy something), the embankment (embankment).
3. Professionalism. Used by people in a particular profession. Programmers have: encoder, broken link, crack, grid, screw. Polygraphists and publishers: lead, hat, basement. The military: Kalash, kapterka, border, integrity, lip. The musicians: soundtrack, plywood, cover, crap, live.
4. Jargonisms. They are a set of colloquial speech of people, characteristic of certain social groups, do not belong to the literary language, but often authors use them in fiction to give the characters a specific expressive coloring. There is a jargon of criminals ( cormorant, cop, mansion), youth ( dude, muzlo, girla), schoolchildren ( fizra, nerd, homework), slang football fans ( contract, abik, leg-ball).
Active and passive vocabulary
The active vocabulary includes words that are constantly and actively used by native speakers of the Russian language in all areas of activity. These words are effortless and unambiguously understood in almost any context.
Passive vocabulary is made up of obsolete or completely new words that without the help of dictionaries are vaguely understood or not understood at all. Such words best demonstrate the process of changing the vocabulary of a language and are divided into the following categories.
- Archaisms are words that were supplanted by younger and more successful synonyms: cardian (heart), bedchamber (bedroom), varny (sultry), nobility (skill), finger (finger), mirror (mirror).
- Istorisms are words that denote disappeared phenomena and objects: coachman, caftan, landowner, oprichnik, span, farm laborer, Armenian, lead, salop.
- Neologisms are very young words that have not yet had time to become part of active vocabulary: ufology, bonus, google, message, offline, reflection, emoticon.