Interlingual Slavic Homonymy: Prototypical and Occasional

Abstract

The issues of interlingual Slavic homonymy are being examinedi n a multifaceted way on the material of the East, West and South Slavic languages. Given research problem is one of the most actual in comparative linguistics, translation studies, as well as in the practice of teaching Slavic languages. On specific examples cases of manifestation of homonymy are analysed, the causes of its occurrence are studied, the character, linguistic, as well as extralinguistic factors that accompany this semantic phenomenon are described. Among other things, unlike most scientific works devoted to this topic, the problem we touch on is considered at all basic levels of the language: phonetics, vocabulary, morphology, syntax, stylistics, and phraseology, a theoretical substantiation of the reasons for the appearance of homonyms in the language (resp. languages) is given. Special attention is paid to full and partial homonyms, which developed on the basis of both phonetic and etymological-semantic commonality of vocabulary or, conversely, accidentally coincided in pronunciation. It should be emphasized the relevance of this problem andi ts scientific and practical significance in the framework of the contrastive study of closely related languages, which is also of particular importance for the theoretical study and practical solution of linguistic and cultural issues of the Slavic community, which, in comparison with other Indo- European language groups, disintegrated relatively late (V-VI centuries AD). Despite the fact thatm uch attention is paid to this problem in Slavic studies, and many works are devoted to describing cases of interlingual Slavic homonymy, including dictionaries fixing homonyms in two or several languages, the importance of this study lies precisely in the fact that its main goal has become a broad linguistic review with the maximum possible coverage of all three groups of Slavic languages - starting with Russian and Ukrainian in the East, Polish, Czech and Slovak in the West, Serbian, Croatian, Bulgarian in the South of the Slavic World and ending with its “periphery” - Slovenian in its South West. As tertium comparationis for the authors of the proposed study is the genetic commonality, genetic relationship of the Slavic languages and, accordingly, the etymological relationship of their lexical structures. The article presents some of the most illustrative, commonand frequent homonyms, including that of representing the translation problem of the so-called “false friends of the translator”. Although the general list of examined homonyms is far from exhaustive, the materials of the article can serve as a solid theoretical and practical basis for creating a fundamental dictionary of interlingual Slavic homonyms.

Keywords

• slavic languages
• interlingual homonymy
• lexis
• semantics
• contrastive linguistics
• lexicology
• comparative slavic linguistics