Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin was a significant personality in the field of education, especially history and linguistics. He was the head of the sentimentalist trend in literature and created new trends in the Russian language. His work became known as Karamzin's language reform.
The essence of language reform
What did Nikolai Mikhailovich want to achieve with the help of his reform? In those days, the Russian language was similar to Church Slavonic, and some features of the syntax made it "heavyweight." The goal of the writer was to remove most of the Latin and Slavic words in order to add words from the French language, which was considered the language of enlightened and educated people.
Principles of Karamzin's Language Reform
The writer saw as his main task that in the noble society they began to write as they speak. To create a "new syllable", Karamzin was based on the language features of Lomonosov. His odes often used difficult, outdated words that put some writers in a difficult position. One of the principles of Nikolai Mikhailovich's work was the desire to bring the language of writers closer to spoken.
To do this, it was necessary to remove from the language all Old Slavs. But it was also impossible to completely abandon them - this would mean depriving the Russian language of its roots, wealth and special charm. Therefore, the following types of Old Slavism were abandoned:
- having a poetic connotation;
- used for artistic purposes;
- used to recreate a specific historical era.
Another principle of the “new” syllable was the simplification of sentences, that is, the replacement of heavy, long, “Lomonosov” constructions with more simplified sentences. It was decided to replace all unions of Old Slavic origin. Karamzin sought to use as many Russian unions as possible, mostly of a compositional nature. He also changed the order of words on the line, which seemed to him more natural for a person.
And the third principle of Karamzin’s linguistic reform was neologisms. Nikolai Mikhailovich tried not only to introduce a foreign word into Russian, but also to adapt it to the peculiarities of Russian grammar. Sometimes, neologisms remained untranslated, because he believed that they sound more complete. But later, the writer revised his views on borrowing and began to use more words of Russian origin.
Reaction to the Shishkov Reform
Of course, such important changes could not but cause an ambiguous reaction of society. There were those who did not approve of Karamzin's language reform. So, among his opponents was Shishkov, a prominent statesman of that time. He was not a philologist, so his arguments were mostly patriotic.
He considered Karamazin a freethinker, a lover of everything foreign. Shishkin believed that borrowed words only spoil the Russian language, distort its essence. Only the use of Slavic words contributes to patriotic education. Therefore, he proposed replacing already established foreign expressions with Slavic ones. So, for example, replace the word "actor" with "lyceum".
The principles of the language reform of Karamzin and Shishkov have a different basis for themselves: Nikolai Mikhailovich understood that the linguistic system needed to be changed from a philological point of view, and patriotism led Shishkov.
Pros and cons of Karamzin's language reform
The introduced innovations, as we said, caused an ambiguous assessment in society. On the one hand, all the changes that have occurred are a natural result of the historical events that Russia experienced. The era of Enlightenment had come, so it was necessary to simplify the linguistic system, to get rid of obsolete words. This is a natural development of the language, since it cannot develop unless new words, oborts and expressions appear.
But on the other hand, the French language has become too much. Its active introduction contributed to the fact that the differences between the communication of the common people and the upper classes became simply huge. And this reform can be called to some extent antisocial and not conducive to the formation of patriotism. But this was an absolutely natural occurrence in the era of Enlightened absolutism.
Therefore, despite conflicting estimates, it should be noted that Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamazin had a great influence on the development of the literary language and general culture in Russia.