South-Western vocabulary in the Russian language of the 18th century

Abstract

The article examines the problem of the south-western influence on the formation of the Russian language in the era of Peter I, as well as the reverse influence of the Russian language on other languages. Based on the Dictionary of the Russian Language of the 18th Century and the National Corpus of the Russian Language, Ukrainianisms in the texts of Feofan Prokopovich, Stefan Yavorsky, Gabriel Buzhinsky, Vasily Trediakovsky, Antioch Cantemir were analyzed. In accordance with the data obtained, in the Dictionary of the Russian Language of the 18th Century, there are about 50 lexemes noted “south-western”, most of which are nouns. It has been found that south-western vocabulary is contained in the writings of politicians and preachers of the era of Peter I (in particular, in Stefan Yavorsky’s), while Feofan Prokopovich actively used Ukrainian words native to him in his own works. Since borrowings and simple speech were one of the tools for reducing formal book style, and among the reformers of Peter’s time there were many representatives of the Kiev-Mohyla rhetorical tradition, Western russianisms in the first half of the 18th century were included in various literary texts and documents. At the same time, normalizing tendencies in the sphere of vocabulary led to the fact that in the 18th century, ukrainianisms and polonisms, which had recently entered Russian speech, went out of use almost completely (as indicated, among other things, by the notes in the Dictionary of the Russian Language of the 18th Century associated with the dynamics of the use of lexemes,  south-western in origin). Many Western russianisms remained primarily in dialect speech, as well as in the sphere of vernacular speech.