Alien and strange in Russian explanatory dictionaries

The aimof the article is to demonstrate the specificity of the national picture of the world throughexotic and dialectal words denoting "alien" and "foreign" in the language. The source oftheir study is The Dictionary of Passive Vocabulary in the Russian Language(Krasnoyarsk, 2005) compiled by the author by continuous sampling of the academicDictionary of the Russian Language (DRL). By exotic words units with a local componentin the meaning were considered denoting the phenomenon as belonging to the non-Russianreality. They refer to the category of the alien. This part of the Dictionary includes 1066words, 1.28% of the DRL corpus. They belong to the periphery of the literary languagesystem.Dictionaries show the processes of de-exotisation of the language: part of exoticwords with broad cultural semantics lose their territorial marks, many lexemes of thepassive stock enter the active one, some words lose the "ideological connotations" due tothe change of the economic and political orientation of the country. The number of exoticwords fixed in dictionaries reduces; still, the basic core of exotic words is stable.The thematic classification of exotic words reflects the general fragments of reality;their names are not traditionally translated into Russian. The most numerous groups ofexotisms are addresses, names of the top leader, clothes and footwear, money, musicalinstruments, etc. By means of exotisms countries and peoples are defined that had contactswith the Russian population (Antiquity, England, France, USA, Spain, Italy are representedbroadly, unlike countries of the North, Central Asia and Caucasus).Many exotic words are connected with traditional religions: Catholicism,Protestantism, Islam, Judaism, etc.Dialectisms represent the "strange" element in the literary language. The DRLcontains 728 dialectisms with a mark "regional", which is 0.86% of the total of thedictionary. The largest thematic groups are "food", "dishware", "clothes and footwear","person's qualities, relations between people", "house and household", "yard, manor","transport, roads", etc.Words describing winter prevail in different thematic groups (clothes, weather, etc.).Numerous dialectisms denoting whirlpools, marshes, boats witness for the aqua-centric ofRussian consciousness. Among the elements of nature forest and twilight stand out; amongdomestic animals nominations of the hen, not the cow, as one may expect, are mostdiverse. In the house, stove and underground are named, in the yard - fences. Names ofsacks, sticks, ropes functioning as belts are numerous; they are used in fiction as artisticdetails. Dialectisms represent the peculiarities of the folk language consciousness.

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