Russian vocabulary is dying

[ybelov.livejournal.com]

At the beginning of the 20th century dictionaries of Russian and English languages contained approximately same amount of words: 200 thousand. In the 1930s English dictionaries had already 600 thousand, while Russian contracted to 88 thousand…

The Russian vocabulary of the 19th century had 153 words with the root LUB (love); now there are only 41 such words. “Love” has shrunk by three fourths...

This data has been collected by philosopher and linguist Mikhail Epstein.

Complete article (in Russian):
http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2009/075/22.html

Comments

[chaosmalefic.livejournal.com]

ды, мы вымираем вместе с языком.

не надо учить наш язык

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

Thank you for your input. However, I would like to remind that the working language in this community is English, so that the learners of Russian, on whatever stage of their study they may find themselves, can still comprehend your thoughts.

[chaosmalefic.livejournal.com]

oh, sorry

I forgot T_T

[surkova.livejournal.com]

thank you!

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

Well, Epstein is advertising and championing his own work, however questionable; his goal (to picture himself as the only prophet in the bare desert) is clearly visible. Good marketing, I hope; intense word-invention has quite a long tradition in the history of Russian literature, where thousands of very useful words are made up by certain writers (like промышленность, by Karamzin; лётчик, by Khlebnikov; or стушеваться, by Dostoyevsky.)

[icamel.livejournal.com]

I have stopped reading at the point that fault, blame, and guilt are all means вина in russian and there are four english words corresponding to russian word исследовать and couldn't read any further.

Multitran gives nine to nineteen russian words corresponding to each of that four.

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

Well, if you are advertizing new brands of ice cream of your own production, it's quite likely that you are stating in your ads that there is no other sort of ice cream (besides some nameless and ugly "Simply Ice Cream") in the market, isn't it? :)

[alamar.livejournal.com]

Couldn't care less about those speculations.

The modern russian vocabulary is more than enough for me to express my thoughts and communicate with other people.

[icamel.livejournal.com]

looks like he read a russian-english dictionary and didn't read english-russian one.

[alexzzzzz.livejournal.com]

Seems like that. He also forgot that Russian has dozens of prefixes and suffixes which could totally change a root meaning. Usually there's no need to create new roots.

[brat-pushkin.livejournal.com]

looks like he haven't ever seen a 'БАС'.

[gauchette.livejournal.com]

There's a sign of greater health in saying "сэйл" instead of "распродажа". I wonder if he realizes, even though I use "распродажа" myself.

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

Thank you for your input. However, I would like to remind that the working language in this community is English, so that the learners of Russian, on whatever stage of their study they may find themselves, can still comprehend your thoughts.

Interesting, but ...

[chouchou61.livejournal.com]

... to most of us learning Russian, there seems to be an endless supply of words to learn. :)

[kali-kali.livejournal.com]

I don't have the time to puzzle out the entire article (nor do I have a Russian dictionary handy to do so), but from what I understand of it from your commentary, and based on the attitudes I see from people in this community and others, it doesn't surprise me. People are often saying things like "oh that word is archaic, nobody uses that anymore" or "people will laugh at you if you use that word in Russia", so it seems to be something that people want (that is, a reduced vocabulary). I don't understand why, but whatever.

[kutsuwamushi.livejournal.com]

But on the other hand, there are words in contemporary Russian that weren't known two hundred years ago.

Counting the number of words in a language is incredibly difficult; no one, to my knowledge, has figured out a way to do it accurately yet. When you want to compare the vocabularies of two different languages, which will express concepts in different ways and have different methods of word formation, it becomes even more complicated.

Whatever is actually happening to Russian vocabulary, it's not impoverishing the language; people use the words that are, well, useful, and stop using those that aren't.

[xnrrn.livejournal.com]

Well, that is both true and not true, about the archaic words. There are waves of old words resurfacing, and new ones being invented.

I mean, languages are living things. The things that author mentions (the numbers) are more to blame on dictionary editors and releasers, not on the language itself, I would guess. :>

[hellga.livejournal.com]

The man's got his theory and he is pushing it through, neatly folding into it the facts that fit and discarding those that don't without mention. Not the first time I am seeing something like that... in many different disciplines.

[barmogloth.livejournal.com]

Buddy, Novaya gazeta is a yellow press. And they hate Russia Russian people. So believe not all that you see nor half what you hear.

[ybelov.livejournal.com]

This is the best newspaper in Russia.
Go and lick Putin's ass.

[barmogloth.livejournal.com]

Idiot detected