Linguists and literary scholars associate the Russian language with a real living organism, in which various changes constantly occur. The vocabulary of the language is constantly changing, for almost ten centuries of its existence, forgotten words appeared in it, which at a certain period of its life played an important role for our ancestors.
The emergence of new words and the "extinction" of old ones is a very important process for linguistics. It is thanks to him that linguists can restore not only the picture of the world that was relevant at a certain point in time, but also track ancient language processes, traces of which are also present in modern Russian (the fall of reduced, palatalization, etc.).
Why do words disappear from language?
The history of rare and forgotten words is closely connected with lexicology - a section of linguistics. It is this section that studies the meanings of words and their relationship with each other. The main reason for the disappearance of words from the language is changes in the life of its speakers, which are associated with everyday life, customs, as well as scientific and technological progress. For example, the word “konka” has gone out of the modern vocabulary, which earlier denoted one of the first types of tram. This happened partly because now this phenomenon does not exist, it was replaced by the usual electric tram.
Earlier in Russia, caftans were worn, now they are no longer worn, preferring more convenient and popular clothes to them, therefore the word denoting this outfit has gone out of use. The less often words are used, the faster they will fade into the background and disappear. As a rule, words do not disappear from the language at one moment, but are retained as obsolete (archaisms) and historicisms.
Archaisms
Some forgotten words have analogues in modern Russian, they are called archaisms. For example, the obsolete word “hope” corresponds to the more relevant “hope” today. “Hope” in this case acts as archaism and can be used in prose or poetic texts to give them solemnity and appropriate style.
In some languages archaisms can play the role of jargon, then they are used to compose legal and religious texts. Traces of the existence of archaisms, for example, derivatives of them, are necessarily preserved in the language. For example, the familiar word “now” was formed from the obsolete word “this,” which had the meaning of “this.”
Classification of Archaisms
These undeservedly forgotten words fall into three major categories. The first of them is lexico-phonetic archaisms. They mean such words in which there is a sound that does not correspond to modern pronunciation. For example, earlier, instead of the usual word “project”, it was customary to use the word “project”. This word was previously borrowed from the English language, where it is still pronounced as “project”. As they adapted to the Russian language, the sound “f” disappeared from the word, and since then it has not changed.
Another category of archaisms is lexico-derivational. They always have a word-forming morpheme (suffix or prefix), which distinguishes these words from modern ones. For example, instead of the modern word “restaurant”, the corresponding unit “restaurant” was previously used. The third category is actually lexical archaisms, these include words that are completely out of date: abyss, shelter, etc.
History
When analyzing forgotten words, one should remember the existence of historicisms - words that are completely out of use and are not included in the active vocabulary of the Russian language. They are the opposite of archaisms and have no analogues in the current language. Historicisms may include words that have become obsolete both several centuries ago and several years.
Examples of historicisms include words such as “boyar” and “Nepman”. At first glance it may seem that these words are actively used in the modern language, but in fact they can only be found in texts describing historical realities. In all other cases, the use of such words in the Russian language can be considered as non-normative.
Where can I get to know the lost words?
Words that previously functioned in the Russian language, but were still lost, can be found in the explanatory dictionaries that began to be created at the end of the 18th century. Undeservedly forgotten Russian words from the Dahl dictionary are a vivid example of this. The dictionary of the Great Russian language has three editions, which were published in 1866, 1882 and 1909. The author of the dictionary, writer Vladimir Ivanovich Dahl, created the first edition over the course of 53 years, and he did this with a kind of indifference to linguistics.
Thanks to this approach of the author, Dahl's dictionary tells more about popular beliefs, folklore and life, than about the features of the language. In this historical document you can find a large number of names of sails, as well as detailed information about their purpose. Thanks to Dahl’s works, a huge number of dialect words have reached our time , which, unfortunately, are not found in modern Russian.
Examples of disappeared words from the Dahl dictionary
If you start compiling a list of rare and forgotten words of the Russian language yourself, then 70-80% of them will be taken from the Dahl dictionary. For example, the word "amanat" was actively used in the XVII-XVIII centuries and was deciphered as "a person taken hostage" or "a person taken to secure something." The last mention of this word is found in literature describing the beginning of the 20th century, but by the end of the 1990s it completely disappeared from the Russian language.
If you continue to search for undeservedly forgotten words, then a steelyard will surely catch your eye. It was they who previously designated manual scales, which had a specific lever and a moving reference point. The second meaning of the word is a measure of weight, which at that time was almost 2.5 pounds (a little over a kilogram). Now this word is not used everywhere in speech, it can only be found in historical literature. You can find a lot of similar words in the dictionary, this is often used by writers who prefer to use them in their work as a kind of "highlight".
Somov dictionary
Forgotten words of the Russian language can also be found in a special edition of V.P. Somov, published in 2000. The publication aims to help those who are interested in reading the classic works of Russian writers created in the XVIII-XIX centuries. The structure of this dictionary includes not only historicisms and archaisms, but also professional, terminological and dialect vocabulary, with which you can understand the uniqueness of life of Russian people who lived in the XVIII, XIX and XX centuries.
According to linguists and lexicographers, this dictionary fully reflects almost all of the now forgotten Russian words. The second edition of the book was published in 2008, the number of dictionary entries in it has been significantly increased, active work is underway on the third version of the dictionary. According to the author, the publication does not pretend to linguistic work aimed at the study of linguistic units, but is a work that allows you to get a picture of the world of past years.
Examples
In Somov’s dictionary you can find archaisms such as “Custodian”, “Shibay”, “Amorous”, etc. And if the word “Custodian”, which in ancient times was called the watchman, came out of the Russian language, then “amorous” is still found in it, but mainly in oral speech. In literature, if this word occurs, then only to give the text a certain obsolescence or elevation.
A distinctive feature of the dictionary is that there are words that, by the beginning of the 21st century, have radically changed their lexical meaning. For example, the word “egoist” in the works of Mikhail Evgrafovich Saltykov-Shchedrin means a small crew that can be used only by one rider. In modern Russian, this word has a completely different meaning.
How to learn obsolete vocabulary?
In school education, such vocabulary is studied quite extensively for all eleven years. Modern teaching methods imply that students themselves learn undeservedly forgotten words, a list of which they make up for classes, using dictionaries and relevant literature. Drawing parallels between obsolete and modern words, students themselves form a list of those words that were forgotten in vain.
You can study vocabulary in more detail at the Faculty of Philology. Here, the vocabulary of the Russian language is studied systematically - vocabulary is taught in parallel with the Old Slavic and Old Russian languages. As a result of this, it is possible to gain an understanding of how historical processes influenced the change of words and the formation of the modern Russian language.
Conclusion
Forgotten words are present in every language, and most often they appear due to the fact that the subject they designate comes out of everyday life. The vocabulary of the language, meanwhile, is not getting poorer, since obsolete words are replaced by neologisms - new language units created to designate new objects that are part of everyday life. Neologisms have their own appearance algorithms, which are studied by scientists.
Moreover, situations are not uncommon when a word that has existed in a language for a long time gets a completely new meaning, and this phenomenon can also be attributed to neologisms. However, scholars still disagree on whether such a word is unambiguously called neologism or not. In addition, it is very important to track the time of the appearance of a new meaning in a given word, since neologisms after a certain time become the standard units of the language. This is precisely what linguists who study the lexical composition of the word and language do. From time to time, amendments and additional comments on existing dictionaries aimed at updating them appear out of their pen.