Will the West ever understand? Reflection of the soul of the people in Russian

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Yesterday I chatted on the phone with a friend who is a teacher of Italian and French, as well as Russian for Italians. At some point, the conversation turned to the rhetoric of the West in the light of recent international events. “Listen,” she told me, all these Romance languages are very simple, so their native speakers have simple thinking. They can never understand us.”

I don’t undertake to analyze how simple European languages are, although I have an idea of French, Italian and English. But the fact that Russian is very difficult for foreigners to learn is a fact.

The complexity of Russian morphology, the mutability of a word, or in other words, the grammatical form of words with endings for foreigners is terrible. Endings express the case and the number of nouns, the agreement of adjectives, participles and ordinal numbers in phrases, the person and number of verbs of the present and future tense, gender and the number of past tense verbs.

Russian people, of course, do not notice this, because for us it is natural and simple to say EARTH, EARTH, EARTH - depending on the role of a word in a sentence, on its connection with other words, but for speakers of languages of a different system - it is unusual and difficult.

How, for example, would an Englishman say a house, a house, a domina? Just a little house and a big house. That is, we can say how the English are a small or a big house, but the British cannot exclaim "which house, domina or house".

Take any Russian verb, which is also a headache for a foreigner: Talk: talk, talk, talk, persuade, dissuade, pronounce, talk, talk, convict, talk, talk, talk, finish, talk or cry: cry, cry, cry, cry, cry, mourn, cry, cry, etc.). This variety of verb formations increases with the involvement of suffixal and postfixal means of the language: to talk, to agree, to talk, to talk, to sentence, to talk, to talk; cry, cry, cry, cry, cry, cry, cry, cry, etc. Well, how can a poor foreigner not clutch his head.

Is it really possible in French, English, or German to compose a whole story out of only verbs? Who is here at the AS from England, Germany, France? Try it. I'm sure it won't work. And in Russian? Yes, easily.

And how can some foreigner explain Russian oxymorons (combinations of opposite words): “No, probably”, “hands don't reach”, “terribly beautiful”, “silent cry”, “eloquent silence”, “old new year”, "living Dead"….

The Russian language is generally very rich and expressive, it contains many words with a figurative meaning, metaphors and allegories. Foreigners often cannot understand expressions such as "ravenous appetite", "heart of gold", etc.

In the Russian language, complex sentences are widespread, with many participial and participial expressions, homogeneous members of the sentence. Hence - complex punctuation, which native speakers cannot always "overcome".

And in the very construction of proposals we have much more freedom than the Europeans. Everything is strict there. The pronoun (subject) should come first, and the predicate behind it, and God forbid, the definition should be put in the wrong place. What are we? We do not care. “I went to the regional library”, “I went to the regional library” or “I went to the regional library”.

In English, for example, in a sentence, both main members are necessarily present - the subject and the predicate.

What are we? We do not care. In Russian, however, a sentence can be without a predicate or without a subject.

How is Fet's poem without a single verb, poor English?

And the famous anecdote about a story in which all words begin with one letter? What other European language is this possible in?

And what about the West's soulfulness? How do you say daughter, daughter, daughter, daughter in French? No way. In French there is a word fille (fiy) which means both a girl and a girl. If you say ma fille (my girl) - this will mean my daughter, if you want to say my daughter (meaning little more), then you need to stupidly add the word little, ma petite fille (my little girl).

Suppose now that "your little girl", that is, the daughter's name is Anastasia, in French Anastasie. How does a Frenchman call his Anastasia affectionately in a diminutive manner? No way. Anastasia she is Anastasia. What's in Russian: Nastya, Nastenka, Nastya, Nastena, Naska, Asya, Asenka, Nata, Natochka, Natushka.

Well, in general, all of the above is the reasoning of an amateur who has nothing to do with linguistics. But what do scholars say about the connection between the language and the national mentality?

“For the first time in the history of science, a holistic linguophilosophical approach to the problem of the connection between the world, language and people was laid by the great German linguist W. von Humboldt (1767–1835). The brilliant insights of this scientist were in many ways ahead of their time, and only in the second half of the 20th century. found a new life, although before that the Humboldt tradition in the science of language, of course, had not been interrupted. In fact, W. von Humboldt was the founder of modern general linguistics and philosophy of language.

The basis of V. von Humboldt's linguistic philosophy was the idea that language is a living activity of the human spirit, a single energy of the people, emanating from the depths of the human being and permeating all of his being

W. von Humboldt defends the idea of the unity of language and the "spirit of the people": "The language and spiritual strength of the people do not develop separately from each other and sequentially one after another, but constitute exclusively and inseparably the same action of intellectual ability." The thesis of W. von Humboldt that "the language of the people is their spirit, and the spirit of the people is their language, and it is difficult to imagine anything more identical" has become widely known.

It is on this basis that W. von Humboldt believes that a person's ideas about the world depend on the language in which he thinks. The “spiritual energy” of the native language, as it were, determines the perspective of the people's worldview, thereby creating a special position in the vision of the world. The somewhat vague concept of "the spirit of the people" by W. von Humboldt in some way correlates with the central concept - the concept of "linguistic mentality".

Humboldt's teachings are so deep and multifaceted, so rich in ideas that his numerous followers develop different sides of the Humboldt heritage, building their own, original concepts, as if fanned by the genius of the great German scientist.

So, speaking about European neo-Humboldtianism, one cannot fail to mention such a prominent German linguist as Johann-Leo Weisgerber (1899-1985). Developing Humboldt's ideas about the defining role of language in the worldview of an ethnos in the book "Native language and the formation of the spirit" (1929) and others, J. - L. Weisgerber, apparently, was one of the first who introduced the concept of "language picture of the world "(Weltbild der Sprache):" The vocabulary of a particular language includes as a whole, together with the totality of linguistic signs, also the totality of conceptual thinking tools that the linguistic community has at its disposal; and as each native speaker learns this vocabulary, all members of the linguistic community acquire these means of thought; in this sense, we can say that the possibility of a native language is that it contains in its concepts a certain picture of the world and conveys it to all members of the linguistic community. "

On this basis, he formulates a kind of law of the native language, according to which “ the native language creates the basis for communication in the form of developing a way of thinking similar to all of its speakers. Moreover, both the idea of the world and the way of thinking are the results of the process of creating the world constantly going on in the language, knowing the world by the specific means of a given language in a given linguistic community. " At the same time, "the study of a language at the same time means the assimilation of concepts that the intellect uses, resorting to language."

A new stage in the development of ideas about the linguistic conditioning of the worldview of the people in the history of humanitarian knowledge is associated with the famous "theory of linguistic relativity", the founders of which are American linguists Edward Sapir (1884-1939) and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941), student and follower of E. Sapira.

In his work "The Status of Linguistics as a Science" E. Sapir expresses the ideas that became the direct source of what was subsequently formulated by B. L. Whorf "the principle of linguistic relativity": "People live not only in the material world and not only in the social world, as it is commonly thought: to a large extent they are all at the mercy of that particular language, which has become a means of expression in a given society.

He believed that the reality of the "real world" is largely unconsciously built on the basis of the linguistic habits of a particular social group. … The worlds in which different societies live are different worlds, and not at all the same world with different labels attached to it. [Sapir 1993: 261]."

« Condition is very important for the Russian soul. Attention to the inner world of a person, to his joys, experiences could not fail to find reflection in the language. This is also noted by Anna Vezhbitskaya in her book 'The Semantics of Grammar'. In her opinion, such a distinctive feature of the Russian character as concentration on the state of mind and feelings is reflected in the language both in the abundance of verbs calling various emotional states, and in the variation of syntactic constructions such as: He is having fun - He is having fun; He's sad - He's sad. ' Even V. V. Vinogradov at one time saw in the grammatical system of the Russian language a special category, which he proposed to call the 'Category of state', substantiating it as grammatical on the basis of the special semantics and syntactic function of the predicate in the sentence. (Girls are bored; My mouth is bitter; I'm lazy today; He's ashamed; The room is cozy; It's hot outside, etc."