<i>Humanity</i> as a Universal of Russian Linguistic Culture

Abstract

The article introduces the development of the content of Humanity as a universal of the Russian linguistic culture and an important structure-forming component of the national ethical worldview. The research objective was to study the relationship between the language and the ethno-historical consciousness of the Russian people. It was based on historical dictionaries of the Russian language, Old East Slavic and Old Russian language corpora, and modern texts from the national corpus of the Russian language. A cognitive experiment revealed the content of humanity as a cultural universal in the linguistic consciousness of young people. The research traced the dynamics of the concept and identified its invariable axiological component. The universal of humanity was greatly influenced by the Christian (Orthodox) tradition, Western European socio-cultural attitudes, and Soviet ideology. The lexeme entered the Russian language during the first three decades of the XIX century from European languages as a semantic synonym for the love for mankind. Some Old East Slavic and Old Russian texts contained a fairly large number of lexemes that name various practical manifestations of humanity, e.g., blagostynya, blagoserdiye, blagodetel'stvo, blagoutrobiye, miloserdiye, milost', etc. At the stage of lexical development, the word humanity meant the positive quality of educated people, like elsewhere in Western Europe. In Soviet Russia, the phenomenon of humanity began to be understood as disinterested help to an indefinite multitude of the "poor and oppressed", as benevolence towards all "working people", and an uncompromising struggle against "enemies". In the modern Russian linguistic culture and the linguistic consciousness of students, humanity is associated primarily with such axiological dominants as kindness, compassion, love for one's neighbor, and respect and caring attitude towards all living things.

Keywords

• cultural psycholinguistics
• cultural universal
• humanity
• conceptual feature
• value-based dominating idea
• dynamics