Alive as life. Alive like life Why the Russian language is alive like life itself

Russian language is one of the most difficult. And this is connected not only with vocabulary and syntax, but also with its history itself. Even for us, native speakers, much in the Russian language 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 veda. The verb good is natural. Live well, earth, and, like people, think about our peace. Rtsy the word is firmly - uk fuck it. One of the options for translating this text is as follows: “I know the letters: writing is a property. Work hard, earthlings, as befits intelligent people - comprehend the universe! Carry the word with conviction: knowledge is the gift of God! Dare, delve in order to comprehend the existing light!”

Which language is closer to the Slavic “ancestor”?

There has long been a debate among patriotic residents of Slavic countries: which language is closer to the original Slavic? Where did the differences between the dialects on the territory of Eastern Rus' (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 addition to the Slavs, Finno-Ugric tribes and Balts lived in Rus'. Nomads from the southern steppes often visited here. The Tatar-Mongol conquerors not only plundered and ravaged Rus', but also left behind many linguistic borrowings.

The 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 Southern Rus' was constantly subject to raids by nomads, could not but be reflected in the local languages. As they say, whoever you play with.
But which language is closer to its Proto-Slavic “ancestor”? We are forced to admit that the Russian language has moved very far from the Slavic language. Modern Ukrainian is much closer to it. If you don’t believe me, try reading liturgical books written in Church Slavonic.

It will be much easier for Ukrainians to understand them; Ukrainian to this day uses vocabulary that 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 now. If it were not for the reforms inspired by them, we would not have the poetry of Pushkin, the prose of Tolstoy, or the drama of Chekhov. Who created the language we speak today?

The 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, and grammar. Peter I simplifies the spelling by getting rid of the Greek letters psi, xi and omega. These letters did not represent any sounds in the Russian language, 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”, “Fert”, and also removed the superscripts, but under pressure from the clergy these letters had to be returned.

The alphabetic reform made life easier not only for schoolchildren of Peter the Great’s time (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 responded about this as follows: “Under Peter the Great, not only the boyars and boyars, but also the letters, threw off their wide fur coats and dressed up in summer clothes.”

Why was the reform needed?

But the real reform is taking place through the efforts of writers and poets of the 18th century: Trediakovsky, Lomonosov, Karamzin. They create the Russian literary language and “consolidate success” with their works. Before that, the Russian language, due to constant contacts with Western Europe, was in a chaotic state. In it, vernacular forms coexisted with book ones, borrowings from German, French, and Latin were used along with Russian analogues. Trediakovsky changes the very principle of Russian versification, adopting and adapting the European syllabic-tonic system - based on the regular alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables.

Lomonosov divides all 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 honor”; and to the third group he included words that have no analogues in church books, that is, Russian words, not originally Slavic: “I speak,” “stream,” “only.”

Thus, Lomonosov distinguishes three “calms”, each of which was used in certain literary genres: the high calm was suitable for odes and heroic poems, the middle calm was used to write dramatic works, prose - in general, all works where it is necessary to depict living speech. Low calm was used in comedies, satire, and epigrams.
Finally, Karamzin enriches the Russian language with neologisms, he abandons Church Slavonic vocabulary, and 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 “falling in love” or “sidewalk.”

Difficult letter "Y"

Karamzin was one of the ardent “fans” of the letter “e”, but he was not its inventor at all. 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 sound designation “io” with one letter “e”. The innovation was approved by the general meeting of the academy, Dashkova’s innovative idea was supported by Derzhavin, who began to use “ё” in his works. It was he who was the first to use the new letter in correspondence, and was also the first to type a surname with an “е”: Potemkin. At the same time, Ivan Dmitriev published the book “And My Trinkets”, imprinting all the necessary points in it. And finally, it became widely used after it appeared in Karamzin’s poetry collection.

The new letter also had its opponents. The Minister of Education, Alexander Shishkov, is said to have furiously leafed through the numerous volumes of his library and with his own hand crossed out two dots above the letter. There were also many conservatives among the writers. Marina Tsvetaeva, for example, fundamentally wrote the word “devil” with an “o,” and Andrei Bely, for the same reasons, wrote “zsolty.”

Printing houses also don’t like the letter, because it causes them to waste extra paint. In pre-revolutionary primers, it was banished to the very end of the alphabet, in the same company as the dying “Izhitsa” and “fita”. And these days its place is in the very corner of the keyboard. But not everywhere the letter “е” is treated with such disdain - in Ulyanovsk there is even a monument to it.

The secret of "Izhitsa"
In Lunacharsky's famous 1918 decree on changes in the Russian language, there is no mention of the letter; (“Izhitsa”), which was the last letter in the pre-revolutionary alphabet. By the time of the reform, it was extremely rare, and could be found mainly only in church texts.

In the civilian language, “Izhitsa” was actually used only in the word “miro”. In the silent refusal of the Bolsheviks from “izhitsi”, many saw a sign: the Soviet government seemed to be abandoning one of the seven sacraments - confirmation, 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 removal of “Izhitsa,” the last letter in the alphabet, and the official elimination 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 put at the end the letter expressing the human personality, individuality.

The secret of Russian swearing

Almost the entire 20th century was dominated by the version that the words that we call obscene came into the Russian language from the Mongol-Tatars. However, this is a misconception. Swearing is already found in Novgorod birch bark documents dating back to the 11th century: that is, long before the birth of Genghis Khan. The very concept of “checkmate” is quite late. From time immemorial in Rus' it was called “barking obscene”. Initially, obscene language exclusively included the use of the word “mother” in a vulgar, sexual context. The words denoting the genital organs, which we today refer to swearing, did not refer to “swearing.”

There are a dozen versions of the checkmate function. Some scientists suggest that swearing appeared at the turn of society’s transition from matriarchy to patriarchy and initially meant the authoritative assertion of a man who, having undergone the ritual 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 tongue.” In the Slavic (and Indo-European in general) tradition, dogs were considered animals of the “afterlife” and served the goddess of death Morena.

There is one more word that is unfairly classified today as swearing. For the purposes of self-censorship, let’s call it the “B” word. This lexeme quietly existed in the elements of the Russian language (it can even be found in church texts and official state documents), having the meanings “fornication”, “deception”, “delusion”, “heresy”, “error”. People often used this word to refer to dissolute women. Perhaps during 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 banned it.

Alive as life

Alive as life
From the essay “What, finally, is the essence of Russian poetry” (1846) by N. V. Gogol (1809-1952). The writer speaks in it about the merits of the Russian language itself: “Our extraordinary language is still a secret. It contains all the tones and shades, all the transitions of sounds from the hardest to the most gentle and soft; it is limitless and can, alive as life, be enriched every minute, drawing, on the one hand, lofty words from the language of the church and biblical, and on the other hand, choosing apt names from its countless dialects...”

Encyclopedic Dictionary of winged words and expressions. - M.: “Locked-Press”. Vadim Serov. 2003.

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Books

• , K.I. Chukovsky. People begin to get acquainted with the work of Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky (1882-1969) in early childhood, so that throughout their lives they can discover new facets of the writer’s talent. Get acquainted with…
• Collected works. In 15 volumes. Volume 4. Alive as life. About the Russian language. Chekhov. Repin. Appendix, Chukovsky Korney Ivanovich. People begin to get acquainted with the work of Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky (1882-1969) in early childhood, so that throughout their lives they can discover new facets of the writer’s talent. Get acquainted with…

Here is another grammar pedant, like many other like-minded people, who loves. And since I’m one of the exact same people, I, in turn, will get to the bottom of it.

So, I understand and sympathize with you perfectly, dear comrade. Yes, knowing the exact meanings of words, checking them in a dictionary, and always speaking competently and correctly is great. But this has always been and will be the lot of individual formalists, and the majority of the population, as sad as it is for us, do not like us and consider us boring, because they want to speak the same way as everyone around them speaks. And this actually makes a lot of sense, because language as such is an ever-living and changing product of the collective creativity of a nation; any changes in the language are simply errors that accumulate and gradually become the literary norm. Philologists and other academicians from Russian language institutes do not invent these norms; their task is to monitor the rules that have developed in the language and record them in dictionaries, republishing them along with the changed norms.

Yes, the word “unflattering” once meant “objectively,” but now most people simply use it to mean “unpleasant” without understanding the original meaning. Someday, perhaps, this word will disappear, or perhaps, on the contrary, the word “unpleasant” will cease to be used, and everyone will say “unflattering.” There are many such examples in the language. For example, the German word “respect”, meaning simply “respect,” was once popular, but has long since died out; now the fashion has returned to use the word “respect” due to the popularity of English. Perhaps it will die out, or maybe it will replace the word “respect”, and it will already become archaic.

They don’t teach Greek in schools now, and no one understands that “epicenter” means “above the center” - everyone thinks that the epicenter is just a center, but for all sorts of dynamic events, such as an earthquake, a nuclear explosion or some kind of disaster . We, who know, are sad that we are the only smart ones and know the original meaning of the word, but we can’t do anything about mass consciousness, alas.

And about science, ecology, oncology, and so on... In general, among the mechanisms of language there is such a trope as “metonymic transfer.” Metonymy allows one to significantly shorten long constructions, for example, “ate two bowls of soup” can be shortened to “ate two plates,” although everyone understands that earthenware is inedible. “To the city - half a tank of gasoline” is also an understandable phrase, although the distance is measured in kilometers, and not in liters or tanks. The names of sciences are very convenient to use to designate the subjects studied by these sciences. “The geography of the Perm region is quite mountainous,” “Mushrooms grown by the road contain a lot of harmful chemicals,” “In spring we want love, because our biology is like that,” and so on. “I ended up in the hospital with oncology” is simply much shorter to pronounce than “with cancer,” and due to the laws of natural language, people will inevitably choose short and convenient constructions, sacrificing formal correctness for the sake of speed.

Once upon a time, like you, I, foaming at the mouth, rushed at any manifestation of “irregularity”, then I read something about linguistics (more precisely, about the laws of language that linguistics studies, note, metonymy again!), popular lectures of the same Academician Zaliznyak looked on YouTube, and somehow he let it go. Now I prefer to simply observe the changes in language taking place before our eyes, without straining too much.

"Alive as Life"

You marvel at the jewels of our language:

every sound is a gift;

everything is grainy, coarse like the pearl itself

N.V.Gogol

The language of the people is the best, never fading and ever again blossoming flower of their entire spiritual life, the language of brotherhood and justice, friendship and peace, sounds proudly and boldly in different parts of the Earth.

The Russian language belongs to the Slavic group of languages, related to it are the living East Slavic languages ​​- Ukrainian and Belarusian; Western Slavic - Polish, Koshubian, Czech, Slovak, Sorbian, South Slavic - Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian; dead - Old Church Slavonic (South Slavic), Palabian and Pomeranian (West Slavic). Long before our era, in the territory between the Dnieper and the Vistula, tribes of Slavs became isolated and developed a common Slavic language. TOV- VIcenturies among the Slavs, by that time three groups had separated: southern, western and eastern. The isolation of groups of Slavic tribes was accompanied by the collapse of the common Slavic language into independent languages.

From VII to IX centuries. took shape, and from the 9th to the beginning of the 12th centuries there was an East Slavic (Old Russian) state - Kievan Rus. The population of Kievan Rus spoke closely related dialects of the East Slavic (Old Russian) language.

In the 12th-13th centuries, Kievan Rus was divided into separate East Slavic (Old Russian) principalities; the language gave rise to three languages ​​- Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian.

On the northeastern outskirts of Kievan Rus XIVV. The state of Muscovite Rus' began to be created, the population of which spoke the emerging Russian language. During the era of the Moscow State and in subsequent eras, the Russian language was the language of only one of the three East Slavic nationalities.

Original Russian words are divided into 1) common Slavic, 2) East Slavic (Old Russian words) and 3) Russian proper

The Russian language inherited common Slavic (beard, eyebrow, thigh, lip, etc.) and East Slavic (Old Russian) words (hook, blackberry, rope, etc.) from the Common Slavic and East Slavic languages.

Since the 14th century. Russian words proper began to appear in the Russian language (gazebo, stoker, etc.). Russian words themselves were created on the basis of common Slavic, East Slavic (Old Russian) words and borrowed words.

Scientists, determining the origin of native Russian words, compare in all Slavic languages ​​the meaning and pronunciation of words denoting the same objects, phenomena, signs, actions. Common Slavic words will be those that appear in all or most Slavic languages, and among these languages ​​there must necessarily be, if not all, then at least a part of each of all three groups of Slavic languages ​​(Eastern, Southern and Western). If it turns out that words exist, for example, only in Bulgarian, then these are South Slavic words; if in Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian, then these are East Slavic words. if words are found in only one of the languages, then they are already the own formations of one or another Slavic language, for example, Russian.

In K.I. Chukovsky’s book “Alive as Life,” the Russian language is described as a living organism that successfully grows and develops from year to year. New words are created and old ones disappear. because life moves forward. Some objects and concepts are born, others die. Some words remain in the language, although the concepts they denoted have long disappeared from life. they continue to live, maintaining a figurative meaning.

According to the testimony of contemporaries, Pushkin, shortly before his death, heard from the famous collector of Russian words Vladimir Dahl that the skin that a snake sheds annually is popularly called “crawl.” He fell in love with this figurative word: after all, the snake, indeed, seems to be crawling out of an old skin. They remember that soon the poet came to Dahl in a new frock coat. “What a crawl,” he said…. Well, I won’t crawl out of this crawl anytime soon. In this crawl space I will write this...” But fate decreed otherwise. A few days later, wearing this frock coat, Pushkin was mortally wounded. Just before his death, having given Dahl his ring, which he considered a talisman, he managed to say: “Take the creeper for yourself too.” This coat with a bullet hole in the right field was kept by Dahl for a long time.

A.S. Pushkin not only made a huge, invaluable contribution to the development of Russian literature. He is rightly called the founder of the modern Russian literary language. “There is no doubt,” wrote Turgenev, “that he created our poetic, our literary language and that we and our descendants can only follow the path paved by his genius.” Lomonosov prepared the ground for the creation of a unified literary language, while Pushkin, according to Belinsky, “made a miracle out of the Russian language.” He managed to throw off the stylistic shackles of previous literary schools and movements and freed himself from conventional genre canons. It was he who brought the poetic “language of the gods” closer to living Russian speech.

Pushkin has long been called the people's poet. And not only because from the wilderness of the village the poet greedily absorbed folk words, listened to and wrote down fairy tales, proverbs and sayings. This element was close to his heart. “Something familiar is heard in the coachman’s long songs...” Pushkin called folk speech “a living and boiling source.” His advice is known: “Fellow writers, read folk tales.”

Pushkin's language is unusually rich. In terms of the number of different words he used, he surpasses such geniuses of world literature as Shakespeare and Cervantes.

But language changes continuously, and we will not find some words known to us in Pushkin. Pushkin did the most important thing: he united different stylistic layers of the Russian language, crossed book and folk speech into artistic creations unsurpassed in their perfection and originality.

I believe that language is the greatest value of a people. Language reflects our thinking, mental development and is an indicator of our culture.

In him(In russian language) all tones and shades, all transitions of sounds from the hardest to the most gentle and soft; it is limitless and, living as life, can be enriched every minute.

Anatoly Fedorovich Koni, honorary academician, famous lawyer, was, as you know, a man of great kindness. He willingly forgave those around him for all sorts of mistakes and weaknesses. But woe to those who, while talking with him, distorted or mutilated the Russian language. Kony attacked him with passionate hatred. His passion delighted me. And yet, in his struggle for the purity of language, he often went overboard.

For example, he demanded that the word Necessarily only meant kindly, obligingly.

But this meaning of the word has already died. Now both in living speech and in literature the word Necessarily came to mean certainly. This is what outraged Academician Koni.

Imagine,” he said, clutching his heart, “I’m walking along Spasskaya today and hear: “He Necessarily will punch you in the face!” How do you like it? A person tells another that someone kindly beat him up!

But the word Necessarily no longer means kindly, - I tried to object, but Anatoly Fedorovich stood his ground.

Meanwhile, today in the entire Soviet Union you will no longer find a person for whom Necessarily would mean kindly.

Nowadays, not everyone will understand what Aksakov meant when he spoke about one provincial doctor:

“In relation to us he acted Necessarily" [S.T. Aksakov, Memoirs (1855). Collection cit., vol. II. M., 1955, p. 52.]

But no one seems strange anymore, for example, Isakovsky’s couplet:

And where do you want

Necessarily you'll get there.

Much can be explained by the fact that Koni was old at that time. He acted like most old people: he defended the norms of Russian speech that existed during his childhood and youth. Old people almost always imagined (and still imagine) that their children and grandchildren (especially grandchildren) were deforming correct Russian speech.

I can easily imagine that gray-haired old man who, in 1803 or 1805, angrily pounded the table with his fist when his grandchildren began to talk among themselves about the development of mind and character.

Where did you get this obnoxious thing? development of the mind? Must speak vegetation"[Works of Y.K. Grota, vol. II. Philological research (1852-1892). St. Petersburg. 1899, pp. 69, 82.].

As soon as, for example, a young man said in a conversation that now he needed to go, well, at least to the shoemaker, the old men would angrily shout at him:

Not necessary, A necessary! Why are you distorting the Russian language? [In the Dictionary of the Russian Academy (St. Petersburg, 1806-1822) there is only what is necessary.]

A new era has arrived. The former youths became fathers and grandfathers. And it was their turn to be indignant at these words that the youth introduced into everyday use: gifted, distinct, voting, humane, public, whip[Neither in the Dictionary of the Russian Academy, nor in the Dictionary of the Pushkin Language (M., 1956-1959) the words gifted No. It appears only in the Dictionary of Church Slavonic and Russian, compiled by the second department of the Imperial Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg, 1847). Words distinct not in the Dictionary of the Russian Academy. Words vote not in any dictionary until Dahl, 1882. Word asshole created by Ivan Panaev (along with the word hanger-on) in the middle of the 19th century. See also Works of Y.K. Grota, vol. II, pp. 14, 69, 83. ].

Now it seems to us that these words have existed in Rus' since time immemorial and that we could never do without them, and yet in the 30-40s of the last century they were new words, with which the then zealots of the purity of language could not come to terms for a long time .

Now it’s even hard to believe what words seemed base and street-smart at that time, for example, to Prince Vyazemsky. These words: mediocrity And talented.“Mediocrity, talented,” Prince Vyazemsky was indignant, “new areal expressions in our literary language. Dmitriev said the truth that “our new writers learn the language from the labazniks” [ P. Vyazemsky, Old notebook. L., 1929, p. 264.]

If the youth of that time happened to use in conversation such words unknown to previous generations as: fact, result, nonsense, solidarity[Not a word fact, not a word result, not a word solidarity not in the Dictionary of the Russian Academy.] representatives of these past generations stated that Russian speech suffers considerable damage from such an influx of vulgar words.

“Where did this come from? fact? - Thaddeus Bulgarin, for example, was indignant in 1847. - What is this word? Distorted” [“Northern Bee”, 1847, No. 93 dated April 26. Magazine stuff.].

Yakov Grot already at the end of the 60s declared the newly appeared word ugly inspire[Works of Y.K. Grota, vol. II, p. 14.]

Even a word like scientific, and that had to overcome great resistance from the Old Testament purists before entering our speech as a full-fledged word. Let us remember how Gogol was struck by this word in 1851. Until then, he had never heard of him ["Gogol in the memoirs of his contemporaries." M. p. 511.].

The old people demanded that instead scientific they only talked scientist: scientist book, scientist treatise. Word scientific seemed to them unacceptable vulgarity. However, there was a time when even the word vulgar they were ready to consider it illegal. Pushkin, not foreseeing that it would become Russified, preserved its foreign form in Onegin. Let us remember the famous poems about Tatyana:

No one could make her beautiful

Name; but from head to toe

No one could find it in it

That autocratic fashion

Now it seems strange to everyone that Nekrasov, having written in one of his stories nonsense, should have explained in the note: “The lackey word, equivalent to the word - rubbish" [Cm. “Petersburg corners” in Nekrasov’s almanac “Physiology of Petersburg”, part 1. St. Petersburg, 1845, p. 290, and in the Complete Works of N.A. Nekrasova, vol. VI. M, 1950, p. 120.], and the “Literary Newspaper” of those years, talking about someone’s virtuoso soul, felt compelled to immediately add that masterly-“newfangled word” [“Literary Newspaper”, 1841, p. 94: “The soul is visible in the game and in the techniques virtuoso to show off a newfangled word.”].