The present paper is a preliminary analysis of Anglicisms recorded in Slovar’ russkogo jazyka XVIII veka (1984—2006), which has been rendered here as the Dictionary of 18th-Century Russian (henceforth, the DCR). As only 16 volumes of the dictionary have been published so far, covering the letter range A-Onca, this study is inevitably limited in scope. A more comprehensive analysis of English influences upon Russian vocabulary will be possible once the DCR has been completed. The Anglicisms discussed in this paper, called otherwise English loanwords or borrowings (cf. HAUGEN, 1950: 213—215), have been checked against the documentation material of the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary (henceforth, the OED). The headwords and sample entries cited here have been transliterated from the Cyrillic alphabet into the Latin one in accordance with the ISO standard. For reasons of consistency, the old-fashioned spelling with jat’ has been modernised.
As results from my research, the DCR records approximately 70 lexical items which are related, in one way or another, to English as a source language.
Anglicisms proper, which the DCR lexicographers label “angl.” (i.e. “English”) to signify direct importation from English form the largest group that encom-passes 38 lexical items. Less numerous are English words taken into Russian indirectly. There are 6 words of such provenance here, and the reference to Eng-lish is signalled by the label “angl. čerez...” (i.e. “EngEng-lish via...”). Borrowings whose origin — English or Dutch, respectively — has not been determined unanimously in the DCR are equally infrequent. These headwords are described as “gol., angl.” (i.e. “Dutch, English”) or “angl., gol.” (i.e. “English, Dutch”),
and the first language in the string is usually treated as the direct, or historical, source of the given loanword (cf. ROT, 1991: 38). In the case of 7 entries, by contrast, the DCR lexicographers include information on lexical items geneti-cally unrelated to English, which were borrowed into Russian via English as an intermediary language, e.g. kalm £ fr. calme, čerez angl. calm, nem. Kalm
‘stillness, tranquillity, serenity of the sea’ (DCR, vol. 9: 216). Finally, the last group, which is also confined to a few items, encompasses words attested in several European languages, including English. In this case, the dictio-nary-makers have treated both English and the other tongues as a potential source of the borrowings, e.g. kastor £ fr., angl. castor, nem. Kastor, gol.
kastoor ‘broadcloth or a hat of beaver’s fur’.
The requirements of contemporary etymology as well as those of lexico-graphical canons are based on the premise that historical dictionaries ought to document the existing range of morphological and orthographic variants.
Therefore, apart from the main headwords, the DCR provides alternative spell-ing forms supported by lspell-inguistic evidence, addspell-ing the earliest date of attesta-tion of the forms in texts. This lexicographical strategy, as applied in the dictionary under analysis, has been illustrated with the entry bifšteks (DCR, vol. 2: 29):
bifšteks 1802 (-fst- 1801, -fsst- 1803, tamže defis), a, m.,£ angl. beefsteks, mn.
The above-mentioned noun is the first item in the list of Anglicisms proper (Russ. sobstvenno anglijskije slova), i.e. words taken to the Russian language directly from English. The whole list of the English borrowings, arranged al-phabetically, can be found below:
bifšteks 1802 £ angl. beefsteks [sic!] (mn.), bil’ 1735 £ angl. bill,
bims 1795 £ angl. beams (mn.), blokmaker 1704 £ angl. block-maker, bombast 1792 £ angl. bombast, bot 1707 £ angl. boat,
buldog 1798 £ angl. bulldog, dog 1798 £ angl. dog,
drej-madera 1790 £ angl. dry madeira (the OED records the capitalised form Madeira),
gineja 1706 £ angl. guinea, gžin 1803 £ angl. gin, kilsen 1786 £ angl. keelson, klerk 1735 £ angl. clerk,
klub 1784 £ angl. club (the DCR records also the form klob, attested as early as 1769, apparently due to the influences of earlier English forms such as clob(e), clobbe, and clobb).
klumba 1802 £ angl. clump,
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konetabl 1755 £ angl. connetabl [fr. connétable] ‘a member of the police force, a policeman’ (the English form is dubious, as it is not recorded in the OED, and has not been used in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, as the DCR editors suggest),
konstabl 1780£ angl. konstable (this form is not in the OED; cf. konstabel, constable),
kriket 1798 £ angl. cricket, kučman 1717 £ angl. coachman,
kvaker 1719 £ angl. quaker (in the OED this word is spelled with a capital letter, i.e. Quaker),
kvarter-dek 1742 £ angl. quarter-deck, ledi 1789 £ angl. lady,
lejvart, lejvard 1708 £ angl. leeward (adverb denoting ‘toward the lee’), lekaž 1722 £ angl. leakage (‘a leak in a vessel’),
liver 1792 £ angl. liver,
lord [17th century] Lord Kiper 1792 £ angl. Lord Keeper; Lord Lejtenant 1782£ angl., Lord Lieutenant; Lord-Mer 1793 £ angl. Lord Mayor [possibly a phonetic loan],
Lovelas 1791 £ angl. Lovelace (the name of a protagonist in Samuel Rich-ardson’s novel, which as early as the beginning of the 19th c. became lexicalised in Russian in the meaning ‘a seducer’),
maraty 1760 £ angl. marathas ‘a member of an ethnic group in India’ (in the OED this form is recorded in the singular form and spelled with a capital letter, i.e. Maratha),
mičman 1720 £ angl. midshipman, midel’fotok 1697 £ angl. middle-futtock,
midel’-staksel 1795 £ angl. middle-stagsail (neither stagsail nor stacksail is recorded in the OED),
miledi 1711 £ angl. my lady, mistris 1799 £ angl. mistress,
mitin 1796 £ angl. meeting ‘the church of American dissenters’, vaterlinija 1755 £ angl. water-line,
vel’bot 1803 £ angl. whale-boat,
ventilator 1763 £ angl. ventilator (the DCR claims that the ventilator was invented by Hales; and although the first quotation in the OED indeed comes from Hales’ publication, no extralinguistic information has been provided),
vig, vigi 1710£ angl. whig, whig party ‘a parliamentary and political party in Great Britain’.
Clearly, while most borrowings in the list refer to broadly-interpreted Eng-lish cultural realia, a handful of words are also related to sea terminology.
Thanks to the reforms initiated at the beginnings of the 18th c. by Peter the
Great, shipbuilding and sea transport in Russia bloomed, which resulted in a vigorous development of this part of vocabulary. It thus comes as little sur-prise that Dutch and English loanwords constitute the core of sea terminology in Russian (cf. SMIRNOV, 1910). Some of the specialist terms in this field, as mentioned above, are bims, blokmaker, bot, kilsen, kvarter-dek, lejvart, lekaž, mičman, midel’fotok, midel’-staksel, vaterlinija and vel’bot.
It may be worthy of mention that the vocabulary pertaining to British cul-tural phenomena and material culture was also transmitted to Russian, hence klub (the so-called English clubs became centres of social life for male mem-bers of Russian nobility as early as the second half of the 18th c.), klumba or ventilator. Interestingly, speaking of the English word ventilator, Russian both borrowed it and calqued it at the same time (vetroduj), as can be seen in the following quotation: “Kakim obrazom dejstvujut vetrodui ili ventilatory v oknach nad gornišnym vozduchom” (TVEO, vol. 50: 36).
Among culture-specific Anglicisms in Russian there is a fairly significant importation, splin (from Eng. spleen), introduced at the end of the 18th c. by a distinguished representative of Russian pre-Romanticism, Nikolaj Karamzin (KOCHMAN, 1999: 263—264). Karamzin was well-read in English literature, as is clear from his Pis’ma russkogo putešestvennika (1797—1801), in which he mentions the loanword humour. The word is cited, in the original English or-thography, after the English novelist Henry Fielding, and it is given Fieldingian meaning ‘mood or state of mind; a specific approach to life’ (KOCHMAN, 1999:
264). In this case, Karamzin is a genuine precursor, because it was only in the 1830s and 1840s that “eto slovo anglijskoe (humour) stanovitsja popularnym v žurnalistike” (SOROKIN, 1965: 128). To such culture-specific English loan-words one should also add the noun speaker, attested at the end of the 18thc. in a popular translation of a legal text: “Každoj Parlament imejet swojego osoblivago Glagolatela, poaglinski [sic!] nazyvajemogo Spyker, Speaker”
(BLEKSTON, 1780—1781: 107).
This borrowing became widespread in Russian only in the second half of the 19thc., which must be attributed to the next wave of Anglomania in Russia.
The following passage comes from Fedor Dostoevsky’s press papers Publicistika (1862): “Orator. V takom slučae ja prinužden obratit’sja k našemu počtennomu spikeru i preporučit’ jemu sprosit’” (DOSTOEVSKY, 1993: 261).
Foreign vocabulary in this period has been examined in a comprehensive monograph on language contact in 18th-c. Russia (cf. BIRŽAKOVA, VOJNOVA and KUTINA, 1972). Somewhat surprisingly, the authors do not include a few Angli-cisms that can be found in the corpus of quotations of the DCR, such as robert (£ angl. rubber) ‘a card game’; per (£ angl. peer of the realm £ lat. par); erl (£ angl. earl); or šerif (£ angl. sheriff). Nonetheless, there is every indication that the loanwords will be given headword status in the consecutive volumes of the dictionary.
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9*
As has already been mentioned, the DCR includes fewer English words taken to Russian via other languages due to a complex language contact phe-nomenon. The DCR lexicographers describe such loanwords as “angl. čerez...”
(i.e. “English via...”), and the full list of such words has been provided below:
karonada 1781 £ angl. carronade, neposr[edstvenno] i čerez fr. caronade (It may be interesting to note, on the basis of the OED, the English word was attested in English texts as late as 1779),
kiks 1798 £ angl. kick, mn. kicks, čerez nem. Kiks,
kommodor 1792 £ angl. commodore, neposr[edstvenno] i čerez nem. Com-modore,
lag 1739/log 1720 £ angl. log, neposr[edstvenno] i čerez go[landskoje] log
‘an apparatus for ascertaining the rate of a ship’s motion’,
laglin’ 1759 £ angl. log-line, neposr[edstvenno] i čerez go[landskoje]
loglijne,
vist 1764 £ angl. whist, whisk, neposr[edstvenno] i čerez fr. whist, whisk.
Linguistic studies on the influences of Western European languages upon 18th-c. Russian clearly point to the fact that English and Dutch competed with one another (cf. SMIRNOV, 1910; BIRŽAKOVA, VOJNOVA and KUTINA, 1972). No wonder both the English and Dutch counterparts infiltrated Russian, very often with equivalent meanings. In such entries, the DCR lexicographers consider both languages, i.e. “angl., gol.” (i.e. “English, Dutch”) or “gol., angl.” (i.e.
“Dutch, English”), as sources of the Russian words.
In the DCR we can thus find several words labelled “angl., gol.” (i.e. “Eng-lish, Dutch”), e.g. galfedek 1722/galverdek 1788 £ angl. halverdeck, gol.
halefverdeck. Similarly, there are a handful of items for which the Dutch origin is apparently better documented:
blok 1694 £ gol. blok; angl. block,
drejf 1720/drif 1788 £ gol. drift, angl. drift,
guze 1720 £ gol. heysa, angl. huzza ‘a shout of exultation, encouragement, or applause’,
lej 1720 £ gol. lij, angl. lee ‘windbound’,
midel 1697 £ gol. middel, angl. middle ‘the middle part of a ship’, midel-dek 1795 £ gol. middel-deck, angl. middle-deck.
Another group of lexical importations comprises words derived, genetically, from various languages (e.g. Latin, Spanish, Dutch or French), but taken to Russian directly from English:
defekt 1720 £ lat., čerez angl. defekt,
kanoes 1765/kanot 1784 £ isp[anskoe] canoa, čerez angl. canoe (mn.) ca-noes, fr. canot,
kat-blok 1795 £ gol. kat blok, čerez angl. cat block,
kater 1714/katter 1790/kuter 1785 £ gol. kotter, čerez angl. cutter, krejser 1705 £ gol. kruissers, čerez angl. cruiser,
kvartira 1716£ fr. quartier, čerez angl. quarter ‘rhumb, one of the principal points of the compass’.
A handful of borrowings must have been a pitfall to the editors of the dictio-nary, because determining reliable etymologies turned out to be very difficult, not to say impossible. In such cases, several languages have finally been treated as potential sources of the given borrowings:
mariner 1697 £ it[alianskij] marinaro, fr. marinier, angl. mariner, monitor 1783 £ lat. monitor, fr. moniteur, angl. monitor,
vest 1708 £ gol., nem., angl. West,
vindzeil’ 1795 £ gol. windzeel, nem. Windseil, angl. windsail.
The last word in the list of English loanwords is livrajs (DCR, vol. 11: 173), which is clearly an ephemeral lexical item labelled “jedin. (= jediničnoje)”:
livrajs 1710 £ angl. livery, fr. livraison ‘provisions delivered on the basis of a contract’.
One might wonder whether it is indeed a hybryd formed from two different, al-beit corresponding, words of different origins. The hypothesis that livrajs is a replica of the English plural form liveries seems far more plausible.
To conclude, this cursory study of the English loanwords recorded in the DCR — only half of the alphabet range has been treated so far, hence the cor-pus of data is still incomplete — raises questions of the role of historical dictio-naries in research on foreign language influences. The compilation of Słownik języka polskiego XVII wieku i I połowy XVIII wieku, which could be translated for the purpose of the present paper as the Dictionary of the Polish Language of the 17th Century and the First Half of the 18th Century (henceforth, DPL) may be a case in point. What this implies is that up to date only one volume has been published, as a result of which a complete assessment of English influences upon Polish, however desirable, is simply not feasible. The modest list of Anglicisms in 18th-c. Polish vocabulary excerpted from the semi-hi-storical dictionary compiled by S.B. Linde cannot, as it seems, do justice to the English influences in this period (cf. MAŃCZAK-WOHLFELD, 1995; 2006). It is hoped, therefore, that the compiled DPL will offer researchers a much wider perspective and more reliable documentation material for the study of English importations to the Polish language and culture throughout the 18th c.
Translated by Mirosława Podhajecka
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