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The Russian language is one of the most difficult. And this is connected not only with vocabulary and syntax, but also with its very history. Even for us, native speakers, much in Russian is still unclear and mysterious. Linguists have repeatedly noted the acrophonic principle of constructing the Old Russian alphabet and even saw in it a hidden “message to the Slavs”. Each of the letters of the Cyrillic alphabet has its own name, and if you read these names in alphabetical order, you get: “Az buki vede. The verb is good. Live green, earth, and, like some people, think of our peace. firt dick. Tsy, worm, shta yus yati. " One of the options for translating this text is as follows: "I know the letters: a letter is a treasure. Work hard, earthlings, as befits reasonable people - comprehend the universe! Spread the word with conviction: knowledge is a gift of God! Dare, delve in order to comprehend the light of existence!"
Which language is closer to the Slavic "ancestor"?
Disputes have long been going on between the patriotic inhabitants of the Slavic countries: what language is closer to the original Slavic? Where did the differences between the dialects on the territory of Eastern Russia (i.e., present-day central Russia), Southern (modern Ukraine) and Western (now Belarus) come from? The fact is that different elements participated in the genesis of the national languages of these countries. In Russia, in addition to the Slavs, lived the Finno-Ugric tribes, the Balts. Nomads from the southern steppes often visited here. The Tatar-Mongol conquerors not only robbed and ruined Russia, but also left behind a lot of linguistic borrowings.
Swedes, Germans, Poles - European neighbors, also enriched the Russian language with new words. The fact that a significant part of present-day Belarus was historically under the rule of Poland, and that Southern Russia was constantly subjected to raids by nomads, could not but be reflected in the local languages. As they say, who do you hang out with?
But what language is closer to its Proto-Slavic "ancestor"? We are forced to admit that the Russian language has gone very far from Slavic. Much closer to it is modern Ukrainian. If you don't believe me, try reading the liturgical books written in Church Slavonic.
It will be much easier for Ukrainians to understand them, Ukrainian vocabulary is still used today, which has long been considered archaic in our country.
But don't get too upset. The fact that our language today is so far from its progenitor is not an accident or the result of a Masonic conspiracy. This is the result of the painstaking work of many talented people who created the Russian literary language in the form in which it exists today. If it were not for the reforms inspired by them, we would not have Pushkin's poetry, Tolstoy's prose, Chekhov's dramaturgy. Who created the language we speak today?
First "dismissal of letters"
In the 18th century, Peter I came to power. He began transformations in all spheres of life, and did not ignore the Russian language. But his reforms concern only the external side, they do not penetrate into the very essence of the language, its syntax, vocabulary, grammar. Peter I simplifies spelling by getting rid of the Greek letters psi, xi and omega. These letters did not designate any sounds in Russian, and their loss did not impoverish the language at all. Peter tried to get rid of a number of letters of the Russian alphabet: "Earth", "Izhitsa", "Firth", and also removed superscripts, but under pressure from the clergy, these letters had to be returned.
The alphabet reform made life easier not only for schoolchildren of the time of Peter the Great (they had to learn fewer letters), but also for printing houses, which no longer had to print extra characters that were not pronounced when reading.
Lomonosov commented on this as follows: “Under Peter the Great, not only boyars and boyars, but also letters, threw off their wide fur coats and dressed up in summer clothes.”
Why was reform needed?
But the real reform is carried out by the forces of writers and poets of the 18th century: Trediakovsky, Lomonosov, Karamzin. They create the Russian literary language and "consolidate success" with their works. Prior to that, the Russian language, due to constant contacts with Western Europe, was in a chaotic state. Colloquial forms coexisted in it with bookish ones, borrowings from German, French, Latin were used along with Russian counterparts. Trediakovsky changes the very principle of Russian versification, adopting and adapting the European syllabic-tonic system - based on a regular alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables.
Lomonosov divides all the words of the Russian language into three groups: the first included those rarely used, especially in colloquial speech, but understandable to literate people: “I open”, “I call”; to the second - words common to the Russian and Church Slavonic languages: “hand”, “now”, “I read”; and to the third group he included words that have no analogues in church books, that is, Russian words, not originally Slavic: “I say”, “stream”, “only”.
Thus, Lomonosov distinguishes three “calms”, each of which was used in certain literary genres: a high calm was suitable for odes and heroic poems, dramatic works were written with a middle calm, prose - in general, all works where you need to depict living speech. Low calm was used in comedies, satire, epigrams.
Finally, Karamzin enriches the Russian language with neologisms, he refuses the Church Slavonic vocabulary, the syntax of the language in his works approaches the “lighter” French. It is to Karamzin that we owe, for example, the appearance of the words "love" or "sidewalk".
Difficult letter "Yo"
Karamzin was one of the ardent "admirers" of the letter "ё", but he was not at all its inventor. In 1783, one of the first meetings of the Academy of Russian Literature took place. Its founder was Ekaterina Dashkova. Together with the most famous writers of her time: Derzhavin and Fonvizin, the princess discussed the project of the Slavic-Russian Dictionary. For convenience, Ekaterina Romanovna suggested replacing the designation of the sound "io" with one letter "ё". The innovation was approved by the general meeting of the academy, Dashkova's innovative idea was supported by Derzhavin, who began to use "e" in his works. It was he who was the first to use a new letter in correspondence, and also the first to print a surname with "e": Potemkin. At the same time, Ivan Dmitriev published the book "And my trinkets", imprinting all the necessary points in it. And, finally, it received wide use after it appeared in Karamzin's poetry collection.
The new letter also had opponents. Minister of Education Alexander Shishkov is said to have furiously flipped through the numerous volumes of his library and with his own hand marked out two dots above the letter. Among the writers, too, there were many conservatives. Marina Tsvetaeva, for example, fundamentally wrote the word “devil” through “o”, and Andrei Bely, for the same reasons, “yellow”.
In printing houses, the letter is also disliked, because because of it you have to spend extra paint. In pre-revolutionary primers, she was exiled to the very end of the alphabet, in the same company as the dying Izhitsa and Fita. And today its place is in the very corner of the keyboard. But not everywhere the letter "ё" is treated with such disdain - in Ulyanovsk, she even erected a monument.
The secret of "Izhitsa"
In Lunacharsky's famous 1918 decree on changes in the Russian language, there is no mention of a letter; ("Izhitsa"), which was the last letter in the pre-revolutionary alphabet. By the time of the reform, it was extremely rare, and it could be found mainly only in church texts.
In the civil language, "Izhitsa" was actually used only in the word "miro". In the tacit refusal of the Bolsheviks from the "Izhitsa", many saw a sign: the Soviet government, as it were, refused one of the seven sacraments - chrismation, through which the Orthodox are given the gifts of the Holy Spirit, designed to strengthen him in spiritual life.
It is curious that the undocumented deletion of "izhitsa", the last letter in the alphabet, and the official liquidation of the penultimate one - "fits" were made the final alphabetic letter - "ya". The intelligentsia saw in this another malicious intent of the new authorities, who deliberately sacrificed two letters in order to end the letter expressing the human personality, individuality.
The secret of the Russian mat
For almost the entire 20th century, the version dominated that the words that we call swear words came into the Russian language from the Mongol-Tatars. However, this is misleading. Swearing is already found in Novgorod birch bark letters dating back to the 11th century: that is, long before the birth of Genghis Khan. The very concept of "checkmate" is rather late. In Russia, from time immemorial, it was called "obscene barking." Initially, swearing included exclusively the use of the word "mother" in a vulgar, sexual context. The words denoting the reproductive organs, which we today refer to the mat, did not refer to the “bark of the mother”.
There are dozens of versions of the checkmate function. Some scholars suggest that swearing appeared at the turn of the transition of society from matriarchy to patriarchy and initially meant the imperious assertion of a man who, having passed the rite of copulation with the “mother” of the clan, publicly announced this to his fellow tribesmen. There is also a hypothesis according to which "swearing" had a magical, protective function and was called "dog language". In the Slavic (and Indo-European as a whole) tradition, dogs were considered animals of the "afterlife" world and served the goddess of death, Morena.
There is another word that is unfairly referred to today as swearing. For the purposes of self-censorship, let's designate it as "the word with the letter" B ". This lexeme quietly existed in the elements of the Russian language (it can even be found in church texts and official state letters), meaning "fornication", "deceit", "delusion", "heresy", "mistake". The people often used this word to dissolute women. Perhaps, in the time of Anna Ioannovna, this word began to be used with greater frequency and, probably, in the latter context, because it was this empress who imposed a ban on it.
"Great, mighty and beautiful Russian language"
The native language is a living connection of times. With the help of language, a person realizes the role of his people in the past and present, joins the cultural heritage.
The Russian language is the national language of the great Russian people. The importance of the Russian language in our time is enormous. Modern literary Russian is the language of our newspapers and magazines, fiction and science, government agencies and educational institutions, radio, film and television.
Language is called one of the most amazing tools in the hands of mankind. However, you need to use it skillfully, having studied all its features and secrets. Can any of you say with confidence that you have mastered your native language perfectly? It seems that among the readers of this book will not be such. And here's why: the more we realize the richness and greatness of the Russian language, the more demanding we become to our speech, the more acutely we feel the need to improve our style, fight for the purity of the language, and resist its corruption. N. M. Karamzin, who did a lot for the development and enrichment of the Russian language, wrote: “Voltaire said that at the age of six you can learn all the main languages, but you need to learn your natural language all your life. We, Russians, have even more work than others.”
Speaking and writing correctly and speaking and writing well are not the same thing. Even if you are fluent in the literary language, it is always useful to think about how to make your speech richer, more expressive. This is taught by stylistics - the science of the skillful choice of language means.
The more literate a person is, the more demanding he is of his speech, the more acutely he understands how important it is to learn a good style from wonderful Russian writers. They worked tirelessly to improve and enrich artistic speech and bequeathed to us to treat our native language with care. The Russian language has always been the pride of our classic writers, it instilled in them faith in the mighty forces and the great destiny of the Russian people. “In days of doubt, in days of painful reflections about the fate of my homeland, you are my only support and support, O great, powerful, truthful and free Russian language!” wrote I. S. Turgenev.
With the help of the Russian language, you can express the subtlest shades of thought, reveal the deepest feelings. There is no concept that could not be called a Russian word. Reading the works of great writers, we plunge into the world created by their imagination, follow the thoughts and behavior of their heroes and sometimes forget that literature is the art of the word. But everything that we learn from books is embodied in the word, it does not exist outside the word!
The magical colors of Russian nature, the description of the rich spiritual life of people, the whole vast world of human feelings - everything is recreated by the writer with the help of the very words that serve us in everyday life. It is no coincidence that language is called one of the most amazing tools in the hands of mankind. You just need to know how to use it. That is why it is necessary to study the style.
No one is born with a ready sense of language. Linguistic taste, like the whole cultural image of a person, is the result of experience, life, and upbringing. Who educates the sense of language? Parents, if their speech is literary correct and at the same time preserves the brightness of expressive means and the purity of the national language; teachers who conduct lessons with love and attention to their native language (be it even mathematics, geography, physical education or labor lessons); the book of a great writer, theater, radio, television - all this contributes to the development of a good linguistic taste in children and adults, in all listeners and readers.
With the light hand of Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, the phraseological unit “great and mighty” was firmly attached to the Russian language. Such an assessment of the native language was given by Ivan Sergeevich in the well-known poem in prose "In the days of doubt, in the days of painful reflections ...". He, from a distant French, tired of the liveliness of French speech, knew better the greatness and power of the Russian language. And yet why is he great and mighty?
If we consider the Russian language from the point of view of grammar, then it is very complex both in terms of word formation and syntax. The vocabulary of the Russian language is loaded with synonyms, antonyms, paronyms, homonyms and homophones so much that it is difficult to study it not only for foreigners, but also for native speakers themselves. Mastering Russian grammar and stylistics at a high level is the lot of the few. Most are content with an average level of proficiency without comprehending the subtleties of the language.
The lexical composition of the Russian language is huge, of which the average Russian speaker uses about a sixth of the entire vocabulary of the language.
The complexity of the Russian language is suitable for expressing a complex thought. Word order, punctuation, and intonation play a role here. Many scientific works have been written in Russian.
In addition, the Russian language is flexible and expressive. He is melodious, beautiful and poetic. It reflected the whole history of the Russian people. A distinctive feature of the Russian language is the bright emotional coloring of words and the multiplicity of shades of meaning. In Russian, for each style of presentation, the corresponding language forms are used, that is, for example, vernacular is completely unsuitable for the book style, their use in this case would be inappropriate.
Masterpieces of poetry and prose were created in Russian. All the power and splendor of our language is captured in the works of Derzhavin, Zhukovsky, Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Tyutchev, Nekrasov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Blok, Bunin, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva and many other worthy representatives of Russian literature.
The Russian language is indeed great and powerful and was given to a great people. And the sacred duty of this people is to keep their language clean, not to litter with slang, foreign words, jargon, to replenish the language with worthy material. After all, to preserve and enrich the native language is to preserve and enrich the national culture.
Language is a living organism, it is constantly evolving: new words appear, the meanings of old ones change. In the process of acquiring new meanings, some vocabulary units change their status, move into other language categories, including becoming swear words.
Such a fate befell, in particular, nouns denoting representatives of the left spectrum of Russia's political life. Words that until recently were neutral have now acquired an offensive and offensive meaning in the public mind.
For example, the word "democrat" is used in the sense of "deceiver" and "thief" - following the results of "democratic reforms" in the Russian Federation and in the light of the behavior of the inveterate "democrats" of Yeltsin's call, wholly crooks. This word should be handled with care these days;
The word "liberal" has acquired a generalized abusive meaning. This is a pederast, and a pedophile, and a bestialist, and much more, mainly associated with sexual perversions. But not only with them, "liberalism" in the mass consciousness is associated with any muck, provided that it is extremely unnatural and vile.
The term "human rights activist" is used in the same row with words of xenophobic semantic content, such as "anti-Semite" and "racist". Anti-Semites hate Jews, racists hate blacks, and "human rights activists" hate Russians. Such personal dislike is experienced by “human rights activists” towards the Russian people and in general everything Russian that they cannot even eat. A synonym for the word "human rights activist" is "Russophobe".
The names of some state and public institutions in today's sovereign-democratic Russia have also passed into the category of rude abuse.
For example, the expression "go to court" is understood as "went three letters!". The word "election" means "fraud". "President" means "self-appointed." The term "deputy" is similar in meaning to the word "rogue". Etc.
An analysis of the change in the semantic content of well-known terms reveals a depressing picture of the socio-political life of the Russian Federation. Classical obscene language is best suited for its characterization. But unprintable words are unprintable, so as not to print them. Therefore, when describing Russian reality, terms that initially did not have such a meaning automatically acquire abusive meaning. Life itself creates a kind of new swearing from the available lexical material.
Actually, it's a sin. Cursing is already a sin, and living in obscene reality and enduring it, hypocritically calling obscene things with decent words, is a mortal sin. It can be redeemed only by active repentance, by correcting reality. What we in the party are trying to do.
Alexander Nikitin
Secretary of the CPS MANPADS "RUS"
