Sussex R., Cubberley P. The Slavic Languages

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< gosuda

rstvennyj universa

nyj magazı

TASS ‘Telegraphic Agency of the Soviet Union’

< Telegra

fnoe Age

ntstvo Sove

tskogo Soju

Initialisms are pronounced as a series of letters:

(24) Rus SSSR [fsfsf¨sfr] ‘Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’

< Soju

z Sove

tskix Socialistı

eskix Respublik

MGU [fmgf¨u] ‘Moscow State University’

< Mosko

vskij Gosuda

rstvennyj Universite

KGB [kagf¨bf] ‘Committee of State Security’

< Komite

t Gosuda

rstvennoj Bezopa

snosti

There are also some mixed types, part pronounced and part ‘‘spelt’’ (25a), and some

involving remodelling (25b):

(25a) Rus AzSSR [azfsf¨sfr] ‘Azerbaizhan Soviet Socialist Republic’

< Azerbajdzˇa

nskaja Sove

tskaja Socialistı

eskaja Respu

blika

(25b) Rus Detgiz [d

ft¨giz] ‘Children’s State Publishing House’

< Gosuda

rstvennoe Izda

tel

stvo De

tskoj Literatury

(note the re-ordering of the component parts, cf. (13) )

Acronyms may be assimilated into the inflexional patterns of the language if their

terminations correspond to regular inflexional requirements: -a/-ja for feminines,

and so on (this termination assigns the acronym to a gender and a declensional

class), and if they have ceased to refer to a unique entity, like vuz (23), they can be

pluralized:

(26) Rus vuz [NomSg], vu

za [GenSg], vu

zu [DatSg] ...

zy [NomPl], vu

zov [GenPl] ...

Initialisms, on the other hand, remain lexically and grammatically less integrated by

case. They can show gender, officially that of the head noun, e.g. Rus KGB is

masculine (komite

t), as are SSSR (soju

z)andMGU (universite

t) (24). With less well-

known initials, speakers are likely to make a guess based on the termination, which

usually means masculine from a final consonant, e.g. Rus E

VM ‘computer’ might be

thus treated, though its head word is mas

na ‘machine’ [Fem]. The same principle and

problem arises with acronyms: the Soviet news agency TASS (23) was neuter, its head

word being age

ntstvo, but it was often treated as masculine by shape (and sound).

Purists often flinch at the aesthetic clumsiness of stump compounds and acro-

nyms. It is true that the number of such words is larger in East Slavic, with Russian

feeding Ukrainian and Belarusian, than in West or South Slavic. Names of

9.5 Lexical innovation: indigenous 489

countries are a notable exception, and even in speech Slavs in the Communist era

often referred to other countries by their initials or acronyms. This practice is now

declining as ‘socialist’ and ‘people’s’ are removed from the country name. The

former Socialist names included:

(27) Blg PNR ‘Polish People’s Republic’

< Po

lska Naro

dna Repu

blika

GDR ‘German Democratic Republic’

< Germa

nska Demokratı

na Repu

blika

Some acronyms are ephemeral, either because they denote ephemeral realia, or

because they are maladroit, grammatically unstable, or simply ugly:

(28) Rus E

OASSPTR ‘Expedition section of air-rescue,

vessel-raising and underwater-technical works’

< E

kspedicio

nnyj otrja

d avarı

jno-spası

tel

nyx,

sudopod

emnyx i podvo

dnotexnı

eskix rabo

Acronyms perform a valuable function in providing short words for complex entities,

and their use is increasing as technology advances, in the Slavic world as elsewhere.

9.6 Lexical innovation: external influence

The Slavs have millennia of continuous experience of close contact with other

languages, resulting in bilingualism, code-switching, language interference and

borrowing. Coexistence is one context in which borrowing occurs; the two other

principal contexts are a culturally dominant language, or a politico-militarily

dominant one. External influences have been moderated by linguistic purism and

language management (11.2), and the avoidance of the wholesale importation of

foreign lexis has resulted in a substantial use of calques (9.6.2).

9.6.1 Borrowing

The Slavic languages have tended to be lexical recipients rather than donors, espe-

cially when compared to major international lexical donors like Greek, Latin, French

and English. The main exception, with Slavic in the donor role, have involved

Bulgarian–Macedonian, in the early centuries of Orthodoxy; Czech on Polish, and

then Polish on Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian; but most of all Russian.

The role of Moscow, Russia and Russian has several phases: first as the Third

Rome and defender of Orthodox religion; and later as the primary vehicle of

Marxist–Leninist ideology and its vocabulary, and the political rhetoric and styles

490 9. Lexis

which it engendered. Though this theory is still awaiting empirical proof, one can

discern an inner circle, Russian-centered and covering the old Soviet Union, with

the oldest and strongest effect of Communist lexis and stylistics; then Bulgarian,

which maintained fairly close ties with Moscow under Communism; then former

Czechoslovakia and Sorbia; then Poland; and, finally, former Yugoslavia, which

was least under Moscow’s direct influence, and where Slovenia was arguably the

most Westernized of the Slavic lands.

The ideological components of these Russian-based linguistic models were often

not welcomed by the receiving languages and cultures, where they were often regarded

as unnatural and unlovely, and have now been vigorously and promptly discarded in

the aftermath of the fall of Communism (9.7). Since 1990 the already lively tendency to

adopt covert borrowings from the West has become a flood. The language academies

have been largely helpless to stem the tide. And, most typically, viable Slavic words are

now being overlooked or bypassed by Western-oriented borrowings. In joining the

mainstream of international consumer and technical culture, the Slavic languages are

making themselves less Slavic, but at the same time also more international.

Excluding local language contact – e.g. Macedonian with Greek – the external

lexical influences on Slavic form several layers. Direct Greek loans are fundamental

to the Orthodox-based languages from the earliest years of literacy, as Latin

borrowings are to the Catholic Slavs. Latin was also a medium for transmission

of Greek lexis to Catholic Slavs:

(29) Rus tetra

‘exercise-book’ < Gk tetradi(on) ‘quarter-page’

Turkic loans persist in East Slavic as a legacy of the Golden Horde (thirteenth–

fifteenth centuries, see 2.3.1), for instance in vocabulary relating to equine matters,

some domestic words and jewellery:

(30) Rus de

gi ‘money’ < Tatar t

aNk

a ‘silver coin’ (via den

‘half-kopeck’)

More substantial are Turkic elements in South Slavic, especially Serbian,

Macedonian and Bulgarian, from the five hundred years of the Ottoman empire:

(31) Blg c

ˇorba

, B/C/S c

ˇo

rba ‘broth’ < Turk c¸orba

Bulgarian has conducted a de-Turkification lexical policy since 1878, though

around 13 percent of foreign words in Bulgarian are still Turkish, including 800

common household terms (Scatton, 1993: 241).

German has been a source of numerous loans, especially in the countries of the

former Austro-Hungarian Empire (as has been Hungarian, to a lesser degree).

But there are important traces in East Slavic and especially Russian as well, from

9.6 Lexical innovation: external 491

the time when Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725) imported German advisers, technol-

ogists and military experts to modernize Russia:

(32) Rus buxga

lter ‘accountant’ < Germ Buchhalter

French, with centuries of cultural leadership in Europe, has left a major mark on

Slavic:

(33) Cz, Slk menu, klis

, bordo

Pol menu, cliche

, bordo

Recently English has achieved a dominant position as lexical donor to all Slavic

languages (9.7–9.8).

Slavs as a whole are more sensitive than are English speakers to lexical imports.

Borrowings can either continue to look and function as borrowed words, and may

even be orthographically unassimilated, as is found in the burgeoning use of

Roman-script English words and phrases in Cyrillic texts on the Internet (9.8).

Unassimilated loans may show non-native spelling and/or phonology, as with the

Slavic adoption of forms like jazz and (its initial) /dzˇ /, and may lack normal

inflexions. Or they can undergo integration into the patterns of the receiving

language. Phonological adaptations involve the replacement of foreign sounds: if

written ‘i’ or ‘e’ do not prepalatalize when they can in East Slavic, the word is still

phonologically foreign: Rus kafe

[-¨ff]. But different phonological properties may

be copied with unfamiliar sounds: Fr bureau, Rus bjuro

, but Cz byro, B/C/S bı



(ignoring the feature [Round] ). On the other hand, some foreign words can enter

into word-formation processes while still being unassimilated in terms of phonol-

ogy and inflexion: Russian s

osse

‘roadway’ ( [-¨sf] ) does not decline, but does have

a derived adjective s

osse

jnyj. Some foreign words may be morphophonologically

acceptable but still not decline (at least in standard usage, see 11.3.1), like Russian

pal

‘overcoat’ (< Fr paletot), bjuro

‘office’ and metro

‘metro’, all of which could, in

principle, decline like regular Russian neuter nouns, as does, for example, vino

‘wine’.

With metro

, however, Russian phonology has at least replaced the [mf-] with [m

I-],

making it phonologically normal. In 5.5.1 and 6.2 we discuss gender and borrowing:

Czech, Slovak and mostly Polish adapt anything ending in -a/-o/-e, e.g. radio ‘radio’

is declinable in all three, and so is kakao ‘cocoa’, only as a variant in Polish.

9.6.2 Calques

Calques, also called ‘‘loan-translations’’, involve the translation of source-language

words morpheme-by-morpheme:

492 9. Lexis

(34a) ‘manuscript’

OCS ro˛kopisanie < ro˛k- ‘hand’ þ pis- ‘write’ Lat man- þ scrib-

Blg ra˘kopı

s Rus ru

kopis

Pol re˛kopis Cz rukopis

(34b) ‘blink of an eye, moment’

Cz okamzˇik < oka ‘eyes’ þ mzˇikat ‘to wink’

Slk okamih < oka ‘eyes’ þ mihat’ ‘to wink’

< Ger Augenblick

Such calque patterns have also involved syntactic calques – with appropriate

adjustments to word order:

(35a) ‘to like’ Cz mı

tra

d < Ger gern haben

(35b) ‘to perish (of people)’ Cz pr

ijı

t o zˇivot < Ger ums Leben kommen

The advantage of the calque is that it uses native lexical material. If there is no

available homeland word to cover a new idea, whether by metaphor or some other

kind of semantic adaptation, then a calque is often preferable to lexical borrowings,

which can fill the language with partially integrated, and nationalistically and

aesthetically irritating, vocabulary. A successful calque requires that the donor

and recipient language have comparable processes of word formation and root

combination, for instance a Head–Head or Modifier–Head order in both

languages:

(36) Rus vodoro

d ‘hydrogen’ (vod- ‘water’ þ o þ rod- ‘birth’

< Gk hydr- þ o þ gen-)

Cz zeme

pis ‘geography’ (zem- ‘land’ þ e þ pis- ‘write’

< Gk ge- þ o þ graph-)

French, which tends to phrasal innovation, is therefore a less suitable donor

language for calques. This process does not always coincide with the source of

the realia concerned: the Russian system of zao

ˇnoe

obuc

ˇe

nie ‘distance education/

learning’, where the root means ‘out of sight’, when borrowed into Czechoslovakia

after the Second World War, was represented in Czech by a calque from German,

lkove

studium (‘distance learning’, Ger Fernstudium).

Calquing also occurs between Slavic languages: Rus uda

rnik ‘shock worker’,

Cz u

dernı

k. And, as Unbegaun remarks (1932), many words of Polish origin in

Ukrainian should be analysed as calques rather than as loans:

(37) ‘Renaissance’: Pol odrodzenie Ukr vidro

dzˇennja

‘translation’: Pol przekład Ukr pere

klad

9.6 Lexical innovation: external 493

Isac

enko (1976: 387) observes that

...loan translation among the Slavic languages has, in our days, come

into widespread use. But this seems to be the rule whenever one Slavic

literary language is strongly influenced by another Slavic literary

language.

A sub-variety of calques involves mixed calques, where part of the word is loan-

translated, but some of the morphological material, like a word-forming suffix, is

indigenous to the target language, and does not accurately translate a morpheme in

the source language. An example of mixed calquing as a lexical policy is Czech

(Isac

enko, 1968). Here the purist movements of the nineteenth century left a

permanent dislike for words or expressions which reflect German influences.

Former calques like Cz rychlovlak ‘express train’ (Ger Schnellzug) have now

given way to mixed calques like Cz rychlı

k, which uses a native word-forming

element -ı

k, and so is also an example of univerbacija (9.5.3.2). Czech shows

numerous other examples, for instance:

(38) Cz na

drazˇı

‘railway station’, Ger Bahnhof

< Cz dra

ha ‘way, road’ ¼ Ger Bahn

and na- þ -ı

‘place’: cf. Cz name

stı

‘town square’ (< me

sto)

9.7 Lexis after Communism

Under Communism there was a certain homogenizing effect on the lexicons of the

public use of the Slavic languages, caused by the ideological, political, economic

and, to some sense, cultural pressure from Russian. But even before the fall of

Communism there was an unofficial alternative model from the capitalist West, for

instance in popular and technical culture, and especially in the relatively more

liberal regimes of former Yugoslavia, Poland and (to a lesser extent)

Czechoslovakia. After 1990 the pace of change was very rapid (11.4.2). The

Russian influence, which had been generally resented and in some areas (notably

in the intelligentsia and youth culture) actively despised, disappeared in an aston-

ishingly short time, to be replaced by the Western models-in-waiting. The Russians

themselves were not slow to clear away many of the lexical reminders of

Communism.

The lexicon was where the effects of the change were most immediately obvious,

and they have been dramatic. While still more centrist and regulatory than

the policy-makers of English – such as they are – the Slavs now have a much

more permissive, flexible, pluralistic and fundamentally democratic approach to

494 9. Lexis

language development amounting to a substantial de facto deregulation of the

languages (11.4.2). Former ideologically prohibited subjects are now freely dis-

cussed in print and in public, together with the forbidden lexicons, which have

switched affective values: ‘red’ is now often pejorative, as is ‘Communist’. This

process is sometimes described by the Russian terms aktualiza

cija/passiviza

cija,

whereby formerly backgrounded lexical fields like religion, ethics and non-socialist

economics are brought into active use, while the lexicon of socialism is ‘‘passiv-

ized’’, or demoted from active to more passive use.

From the lexical point of view, with the Russian ideological influence gone,

the Slavic lexicons are now showing some convergence as a result of wholesale

borrowings from the West, and especially from English. While this will not affect

the core vocabularies – the Indo-European, Proto-Slavic and specifically modern

Slavic lexical bases – it is likely that youth and technical jargon, and the language

of advertising and business, will have a longer-lasting radical effect on the

language of everyday life. On the other hand, the conservative effect of the national

language academies and the education systems are likely to act as a brake, or at

least a moderating influence. A growing political disillusionment is already

making itself felt in a revival of voter support for the representatives of the old

order. With this comes a heightened suspicion of the merits of the Western way.

When combined with nationalism, these forces may well reinforce a movement

back from a wider Westernization and internationalization of the lexicons.

A striking feature of the modern Slavic lexicons is a growing pluralism, which

has replaced the former top-down monolithic model of language regulation under

Communism.

Ryazanova-Clarke and Wade (1999) present a detailed summary of the cate-

gories of lexical realignment and change in Russian. Their overall profile is applic-

able broadly to other Slavic languages, though Russian – together with Ukrainian

and Belarusian – had been longest under Communism, and so had more to reform.

For Ukrainian and Belarusian there was the additional process of de-Russification.

Eastern Europe, and to a lesser extent Bulgaria, had not been lexically so closely

in the Moscow ambit, and Yugoslavia still less.

The list of lexical changes offered by Ryazanova-Clarke and Wade includes:



revitalization and reorientation of formerly marginalized pre-

1917 vocabulary, including religious (e.g. words in bla

go-), culture

(gimna

zija ‘high school’), economic (a

kcija ‘share’, ry

nok ‘market’),

workplace (zabasto

vka ‘strike’) and related vocabulary;



restoring older forms of address, e.g. tova

ris

‘comrade’ has been

replaced by gospodı

n ‘Mr’ and gospozˇa

‘Mrs’;

9.7 Lexis after Communism 495



some continuations of Soviet patterns of lexical enrichment, e.g. initi-

alisms like NDR ¼ Nas

Dom Rossı

ja ‘Our Home (is) Russia’, the name

of a new political party in the 1990s;



restoring institutions like the Duma (parliament) and functions like

r ‘mayor’;



reinstating positive connotations in words like kapita

l ‘capital’ and

shifting formerly positively valued words like sove

tskij ‘soviet’ into

negative evaluation. Solida

rnost

‘solidarity’ – the political use of the

term derived from the French social philosopher Proudhon – had

already earned a new place in the post-Communist pantheon by its

association with the Polish trade union Solidarnos

;



words like ma

fija ‘mafia’, formerly used of foreign entities, could now

refer to Russian ones;



increasing use of vulgar language, argot, criminal and street slang in

everyday usage, including the media and written language;



extensive borrowing, mainly from or via English, in areas like eco-

nomics (audı

t ‘audit’), technology (pe

jdzˇer ‘pager’), lifestyle (karao

‘karaoke’), realia (transseksua

l ‘trans-sexual’), media (remı

ks ‘remix’),

fashion (le

ginsy ‘leggings’), food (ko

rnfleks ‘cornflakes’), sports

(fı

tness ‘fitness’) and music (dzˇe

m-se

n ‘jam-session’). Many of the

trendier borrowings have unstable spelling, and may not survive;

others are superfluous but trendy, like s

op ‘shop’;



massive reversal of the names of towns, cities, streets, squares and

monuments to pre-Communist times: Leningra

d reverted to Sankt

Peterbu

rg, and Go

kij to Nı

zˇnyj No

vgorod. Names involving

Communist hallowed words like ‘October’ (Rus oktja

) and

‘Communist’ (Rus kommunı

st) were changed virtually across the

board.

And, more generally, there was a de-cliche

-ization of public language, so that the

worn journalistic phrases quickly fell out of use. New capitalist cliche

s are taking

their place.

Such changes are paralleled, though to a lesser degree, outside the old Soviet

Union, where, for instance, place-naming had not been ideologized to anything like

the same extent, and where there was more continuity with pre-Communist pat-

terns. There were also people alive who could remember what it had been like

before Communism. Scholar-publicists like Solzhenitsyn have been active in pro-

moting a more ‘‘Slavizing’’ approach, and there have been debates about the

integrity and direction of the languages, for instance in the new Russian Academy

496 9. Lexis

journal Rusistika segodnja ‘Russian Studies Today’, and in bodies like the Russian

Language Council, established in 1995.

9.8 Slavic on the Internet

The Internet has been enthusiastically welcomed in the Slavic countries, though its

degree of penetration is stronger in urban areas and wealthier countries, and is

limited by physical networks and the cost and speed of hardware and connectivity.

The commercial and interpersonal communication potential of the Internet was

quickly taken up as Slavic Internet use increased with breakneck speed from a low

starting-point. The Internet brought overseas language, styles, commerce, commu-

nication and news directly into the personal experience of the Slavs, and has made

their world culturally and linguistically radically more pluralistic and international.

The Internet has also contributed to the loosening of the language norms, because

it encourages rapid, semi-edited interaction which may break the formal rules of

orthography, grammar and lexis, together with linguistic experimentation and

idiosyncrasy, non-standard forms (e.g. ignoring diacritics on the Internet and in

SMS communications) and abbreviations.

As a result, the Internet shows a celebration of non-standard language which is

very similar to what one finds in France or Germany, where imported English-

language models jostle for position with indigenous ones. Similar trends are found

in paper media like magazines, but not to the same rampant extent. The influence

of English in particular is dominant in borrowings. A search for cool or kool (to

[partially] accommodate orthography) on the Internet on language domains for the

Slavic languages listed on Google in October 2003 showed:

Russian: 96,400 Polish: 78,600 Czech: 38,600 Slovak: 15,800

Serbian: 8,860 Slovenian: 7,770

(comparable figures for French are 335,000, and for German 871,000: one would

need to check total Internet users to compare the numbers proportionately against

population and Internet access).

Code-switching into English is endemic (11.4.2) – including Cyrillic  Roman

alphabet-switching – especially in ‘‘excited’’ discourses like MTV, chat rooms and

advertising, and in SMS messages. Using cool again (and hot) we find both

attributive and predicative use:

(39) Cz (from an advertisement for rubber body-suits)

Cool materia

l, hot pocit.

‘Cool material, hot sensation.’

9.8 Slavic on the Internet 497

Jsem kluk, ktery

d latex, gumu, igelit, PVC a jine

COOL

materia

ly ve ktery

ch je skve

le HOT.

‘I am a man who likes latex, rubber, polythene, PVC and other

COOL materials in which he is sensationally HOT.’

An Internet Russian example is possibly linguistically even more outrageous:

(40) Rus (from an advertisement for a mobile/cell phone)

per a

kcija! Mobı

la ot ru

sskogo sa

jta!

‘Super sale! A mobile from a Russian site!’

Na sa

jte predsta

vlen rezul

tob

ektı

vnogo i nezavı

simogo

issle

dovanija spo

nsorov, platja

ix rea

nye $$$ Rossı

jskim web

mastera

m. (‘$$$’ and ‘web’ are in Roman script)

‘On the site is presented the result of an objective and inde-

pendent examination by sponsors who are paying real $$$ to

Russian web masters.’

Here web mastera

m shows a new tendency (in addition to alphabet-switching):

to take an Adjective þ Noun sequence from English, treat the modifier as indeclin-

able, and decline only the head. Cool sajt ‘cool site’ is found in Bosnian, Croatian

and Polish sites, and in Polish we find the plural cool sajty, just as we also find top

modelki ‘top models’. But the Adjective þ Noun construction can sometimes be

treated with a post-posed invariant modifier: a Russian site has igra

cool ‘cool

game’ with the order Noun þ Adjective (5.5.2).

498 9. Lexis