BIBLE WINGED WORD IN SLAVIA

Abstract

The author argues that intercultural relations of the Slavic world were largely stimulated by translations of the Bible into national literary languages. It was the translations of the Holy Scripture into vernacular languages that became the basis of the book languages of Europe. Despite the fact that commenting on the text of the Bible is one of the most ancient and traditional activities of philologists, many aspects of this complex problematic can still be considered underdeveloped. These include, in particular, questions about the specifics of the assimilation by languages of those elements that go back to the text of the Bible, the nature of their further development in each of these languages, etc. To some extent, the language of the Bible is a language “in itself”, a kind of spiritual code uniting the peoples of Christian cultures. All the more significant from the point of view of comparative study of literary languages are those differences that are observed precisely in the area of lexical and semantic phenomena. They largely determine the specifics of the national adaptation of biblical expressions and their phraseology. The legacy of the Bible deserves specialized analysis when comparing even closely related languages. Particular attention is paid to winged words and expressions of biblical origin, since they captured and preserved the figurative and ideological “divine inspiration” of the Holy Scripture. The Russian language, in which the Orthodox faith with its orientation toward Church Slavonic sacred texts harmoniously converged with pan-European culture and the influence of Polish, French, German and other languages, reveals its own specific features here. Thus, unlike other European languages, it adopted many borrowings from Greek through Church Slavonic translations, which acquired a marked style and semantics in literary and speech use and therefore acquired the status of biblicalisms. Many words-realia, marked by the era reflected in the Holy Scripture, passed into the Church Slavonic text of the Bible, and then into its synodal translation into Russian. These include, for example, the names of measures of weight, monetary units, animals, plants, etc. The report offers a comparative analysis of the most commonly used Slavic biblical expressions, reflecting both the intercultural commonality of such linguistic units and their rather noticeable differences.