Журнал «Филоlogos»

PECULIARITIES OF ABSTRACT VOCABULARY IN THE RUSSIAN AND ENGLISH QURAN VERSIONS: LINGUOCULTURAL ASPECT

Author: Mihailova E.V., Mirontseva S.A.

This article deals with the subject of the phenomenon of language abstractness. Nowadays in Russian linguistics due to the increasing number of studies in the field of the basic markers of "difficult" texts, as well as lexical units with a strong visual potential, which are widely used, for example, in advertising communication, special attention is paid to the criterion of distinguishing between concrete and abstract vocabulary. According to the semantic criterion, the meaning of each lexical unit contains both components of abstractness and components of concreteness. The study of abstract vocabulary functioning in religious texts is associated with the problem of language, culture and religion interaction, as well as the need to reconstruct a fragment of the religious picture of the world. Comparative analysis of the abstract lexical units, functioning in the texts of the Russian and English Koran Versions, is carried out in the linguocultural linguistics paradigm. Lexical meaning is the most mobile and changeable element of the language system. The analysis of substitutions of the abstract linguistic units (nouns, adjectives and verbs) in the modern English Koran Version makes it possible to study in details the dependence of semantic changes on changes in society during the transition from one development stage of ethnic group to another one. The purpose of this work is to study, especially at the lexical and semantic level, the ways and mechanisms of substitution of abstract linguistic units, as well as the interpretation of their linguocultural features in the Russian and English Koran Versions. In the late English Qur'an Version texts translated by Dr. Muhammad Taqi-ud-Din Al-Hilali and Dr. Muhammad Mohsin Khan, in comparison with the early Koran Version texts in the translation of Abdullah Yusuf Ali, various substitutions of these lexical units were revealed under the influence of both lingual and extra-lingual factors. The lingual factors include such phenomena as the development of the English language, the modernization of the religious language of the Holy Scriptures of Muslims, as well as the phenomenon of polysemy. The extralinguistic factor is such a Muslim radical religious and political movement as Wahhabism, namely, the influence of the comments, being the interpretations of the Wahhabist school, and the prophetic (Arabic) language "interference" in the text. The abstract vocabulary selected from the version of the Koran in the Russian translation by Ignatiy Yulianovich Krachkovsky, when compared with the linguistic units of the English Koranic texts, is distinguished by increased emotionality and a high level of expressiveness.