3.8. Words of Slavic Origin in the English Language

Slavic languages (also called Slavonic languages), a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of central Europe, and in northern part of Asia. Scholars traditionally divide them into three main brunches:

1) East Slavic, which further subdivides into: Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian.

2) West Slavic, including: Czech and Slovak, Upper and Lower Sorbian (minority languages in Germany), and Polish.

3) South Slavic, which further subdivides into:

a) Western subgroup composed of Slovene and Serbo-Croatian;

b) Eastern subgroup composed of Bulgarian, and Macedonian (See Wikipedia).

Most scholars agree that despite a comparable extent of historical proximity, the Germanic languages demonstrate less significant Slavic influence partly because Slavic migration were mostly headed south rather than west and partly due to political reasons, when there was a tendency to diminish Slavic contribution to Germanic languages.

The Slavic nations have also made a contribution through the millions of immigrants to the English speaking nations from that part of Europe. That is why Canadian English is featured by a number of borrowings from Ukrainian, e. g.: babka, bandura, borshch, chernozem, cossak, hetman, holubtsi, hopak, pysanka. American English shows more significant Slavic influence due to Yiddish. The term ‘Ameridish’ is used to describe new words, or new meanings of existing Yiddish words, created by English-speaking persons with some knowledge of Yiddish. Some of these words have Slavic diminutive suffix –chik(-ik)(-ic): e.g.: boychick – boy, young man; nudnik – a pest, ‘pain in the neck’, a bore (from Ukrainian or Polish ‘nudne’); alrightnik – mail, female individual who has been successful, nouveau riche; bulbenik – an actor, who muffs his lines (from bilbul – mixup (alternative theory- bulba (Ukrainian)– potato).

Some words in the process of borrowing can undergo some semantic transformations, as the Russian word babushka (an old woman), which has restricted its meaning to - ‘a headscarf tied under the chin, worn by Russian peasant women’. The original meaning of this word - ‘an old woman or grandmother’ is preserved in the recent coinage babushkaphobia – ‘dislike of or aversion of grandchildren, fear of grandmothers’.

Having analyzed the lexical transfer between English and Slavic languages, Danko Ŝipka has made the following conclusions: 1) Lexical and cultural influence from subordinate to dominant language is by and large limited by the culture-bound items. Borrowed vocabulary items remain marginal in the overall English vocabulary. Several exceptions from this trend, i.e. words which have made it to the core of the English vocabulary as a result of the butterfly effect and can not be accounted for by some general trend. 2) Lexical influence of each particular language is directly proportionate to language size. Exceptions from this general trend occur, as demonstrated by East Slavic languages, when one language clearly dominates others. 3) The timeline of borrowing is directly proportionate with the growth and deepening of the international communication networks of the twentieth century (See Danko Ŝipka. Slavic Lexical Borrowings in English: Patterns of Lexical and Cultural Transfer// Studia Slavska. Académia Kiadó, vol.49, Numbers 3-4/ November 2004, p.353-364).

If we examine the total English vocabulary closely, we see that a great proportion of it consists of words of ultimately foreign origin. Yet, according to John Algeo (1991:4): “Many such words were actually formed in English, so the extremely high percentage of borrowing sometimes reported for English is exaggerated”. Algeo (1991:4) divides borrowings into three types: simple loans, adapted loans and loan translations.

Simple loans are words adopted directly into English, sometimes with minor changes in pronunciation to make them confirm to English sound norms and patterns. Occasionally, spelling changes of a similar kind are also required but with no major change of form. E.g. artel, troika, perestroika, glasnost, pryzhok (from Russian), dumka (from either Czech or Ukrainian), and polka (from Polish).

Adapted loans, on the other hand, involve some morphological change (change of form), rather than slight modifications of phonology and orthography. In other words, they are adapted from their foreign word pattern into a more native (English) one. For example, a foreign ending may be omitted and replaced with a native suffix: E. g.: constructivism (from the Russian konstructizm), folkloristics (from the Russian folkloristika) and akathisia (from Czech akathiste).

Loan translations or calques differ from the above borrowings in that they are not foreign in their form but in the meaning they convey, i. e. instead of borrowing the form of a foreign word, English sometimes borrows its meaning, rendering the foreign sense by suitable words in the form of literary translation already part of the English vocabulary. E.g. wall newspaper (transl. from Russian stengazeta), godless (transl. from Russian bezbozhnik), biogeochemistry (transl. from Russian biogeokhimia), superplasticity (transl. from Russian sverkhplastichnost), foregrounding (transl. from Czech aktualisace).Often calques exist alongside the corresponding simple loans they translate: bachelors and the Russian holostiaky, saturdaying and the Russian subbotnic, plum pox and the Bulgarian starka.