Language and Culture
The language of any people is his historical memory embodied in the word. The thousand-year spiritual culture, the life of the Russian people, were peculiarly and inimitably reflected in the Russian language, in its oral and written forms, in monuments of various genres – from ancient Russian annals and epic novels to works of contemporary fiction. And, therefore, the culture of languages is the culture of the word as an inseparable link between many and many generations.
The native language is the soul of the nation, the primary and most obvious sign of it. In language and language, such important features and features as national psychology, the nature of the people, the warehouse of their thinking, the unique uniqueness of artistic creativity, the moral state and spirituality are revealed.
Emphasizing the spirituality of the Russian language, KD Ushinsky wrote: “In the language of the people, for many millennia and millions of individuals, he composed
To know the expressive means of the language, to be able to use its stylistic and semantic riches in all their structural diversity – this is what every native speaker should strive for.
The protection and protection of natural resources, the health of the people are now recognized as an important nation-wide business. Protected and restored monuments of material culture – part of the spiritual historical heritage. Our language needs the same careful approach. Russian literary language should be protected from clogging vulgarism and jargon, from stylistic “decline” and style “averaging,” ie, leveling or stamping. It must be protected from unnecessary foreign borrowing,
That is why the culture of language can and should be understood in its own ecological aspect – as part of a healthy surrounding “speech environment of existence”, freed from errors and inaccuracies, unwanted leveling and “distillation” that adversely affect the life of the language, on common spirituality and morality.
The culture of speech in its traditional sense is the degree of fluency in the literary language (its norms, stylistic, lexical and grammatical-semantic resources) for the purpose of the most effective communication in various communication conditions. An ecological approach to the issues of the culture of speech, speech communication presupposes a responsible attitude to the national linguistic traditions, the education of an effective love for the native language, care for its past, present and future. All this is the essence of the ecological aspect of the culture of speech, if we understand it broadly and in a generalized manner.
The subject of linguistic ecology is the culture of thinking and speech behavior, the education of linguistic taste, the protection and “improvement” of the literary language, the determination of ways and means of enriching and improving it, and the aesthetics of speech. The linguoecological approach presupposes a careful attitude to the literary language both as a culture and as an instrument of culture. L. Shcherba rightly compared the language in which the stylistic structure is destroyed, with a completely upset musical instrument, “with the only difference that the instrument can be immediately adjusted, and the stylistic structure of the language is created over the centuries.” But it is worthwhile to think about the fact that any lost, distorted or misunderstood word is a world lost to us, a link in our culture.
Unfortunately, we are disaccustomed to the beauty of the word, how to wean from the beauty and decor of our home, from the beauty of the melodious Russian melody, the traditional rite. And is it really so bad to become on the way to this “weaning” a conscious guardian of the native language, its beauty and imagery? Of course not. We very long scattered native stones, not caring of the future. It’s time to collect them. The ecology of language and, more broadly, the ecology of culture becomes one of the most urgent tasks of our time, when the ecologization of science, human behavior and thinking itself are an important sign of the times.
The history of the term (and concepts) ecology dates back to the 60s of the XIX century. As known, the term ecology, or oikology (from the Greek oikos “dwelling”, “habitat” and logos “doctrine”) was proposed in 1866 by a famous German naturalist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919). He was one of the greatest biologists of the XIX century, a reformer of science, a supporter of the evolutionary doctrine of Charles Darwin. He wrote the fundamental “General morphology of the body” and many other works. One of the first he proposed the “family tree” of the entire animal kingdom and formulated the famous biogenetic law, according to which ontogeny (individual development of the individual) is, as it were, a brief repetition of phylogenesis (the most important stages in the evolution of the entire group to which this individual belongs).
Nowadays ecology of culture or, more broadly, spiritual ecology is actively formed. It is related to the preservation (or revival) of accumulated values, as well as to the rational regulation of technological progress, which should not adversely affect a person. “The preservation of the cultural environment is no less important than the preservation of the surrounding nature.” If nature needs a person for his biological life, then the cultural environment is just as necessary for his spiritual, moral life, for his “spiritual settled way of life,” for his attachment to his native places, for his moral self-discipline. “
The historian-archeologist VL Yanin quite figuratively and accurately disclosed the content of the concept of “ecology of culture”. According to him, if you uproot the tree, you can grow a new one in its place; but if we destroy cultural monuments, erase the historical toponymic names from the geographical map, then we destroy the genetic code of our historical memory. Such losses break the connection between times and generations and ultimately lead to a fall in morality. In addition, if the monuments of architecture can be restored (although this will already be a “replica”, in the terminology of the restorers), the burnt manuscripts and lost books are irreparable.
Culture of language, speech culture enters the ecology of culture as an important part. In fact, if culture is a collection of the achievements of society in the field of science, education, art, etc., then these achievements are fixed, as a rule (though not exclusively) in the language and in the word. The connection of a common culture with such a form of language as its “literary language”, literally processed, fixed in writing and in oral patterns, is absolutely unquestionable. Arising at a certain historical stage and in known cultural and historical conditions, the literary language itself is a testimony and an indicator of the level of spiritual development of the people in this or that period of time.
It should be noted that the modern era introduces a lot of new in the Russian literary language of our days, especially in such areas as vocabulary and phraseology, the compatibility of words, their stylistic coloring, and so on.
Among the factors and conditions for the development of the modern Russian language (internal and external), we can, in our opinion, highlight three. Effects on the everyday “speech environment” of each of them are both unequal, and ambiguous at the same time.
First, it is the nationwide literary language that led and leads to the constant renewal of literary norms, to their liberation from obsolete elements and features that contradict the spirit of popular speech, the tendencies of general language development, towards democratization.
Secondly, this is a broad and active introduction of the modern educated reader to the works of such writers as V. Nabokov, B. Zaitsev, I. Shmelev, M. Aldanov, acquaintance with the works of N. Berdyaev, S. Bulgakov, P. Struve, P. Sorokin, V. Rozanov, G. Fedotov, E. Trubetskoy, P. Florensky, D. Andreev and many others. etc. All this, of course, affects the modern literary language, raising its authority, educating the language taste of speakers and writers.
Finally, it is the flourishing of all genres of modern journalism, the development of mass media directly reflecting the breathing of time, active processes taking place in society and the language. Here it is also necessary to say about the development of various types and genres of oral public speech, who seek their support in the traditions of national Russian eloquence, in the patterns of oratorical skill of the past and present.
In modern literary language there is an intensive convergence of traditional book-written and oral means with everyday-colloquial elements, urban vernacular, social and professional dialects. However, the well-known liberation of literary norms should not lead to their loosening or stylistic decline.
As a normal and inevitable process, such emancipation creates conditions for the richness and diversity of all expressive means and, consequently, for the improvement of speech culture. However, we are well aware that modern oral and written speech is stylistically reduced and coarsened. The language of fiction tends to be impersonal and standard (including the standards of modern modernism and underground). The language of science suffers from unnecessary complication, the abundance of not always justified foreign borrowing in the field terminology
Publicism sometimes sins with verbosity, indistinctness and inexpressiveness The legitimate anxiety of the public is caused by the argotic elements pouring into our print, monotonously used for the “revival” of texts. For example: download rights, in the law (often in the headlines of articles), hang noodles on the ears, powder the brains, for free, hang out and pl. etc. Such deliberate coarsening of speech, of course, does not have a direct relation to the normal processes of democratization of the literary language and is, rather, a reflection and an indicator of the insufficiently high level of the speech and general culture of speakers and writers, the lack of language taste.
The state of the modern literary language excites writers, journalists, scientists, a wide circle of educated people, everyone who cares about the fate of Russian speech, who are seriously concerned about the state of its culture.
Language is not something frozen and immutable. He is in perpetual motion, because a lot of different factors are constantly acting on talking people – and external, as they say, extralinguistic, and internal, actually linguistic. The Russian linguist IA Baudouin, in one of his articles, was amazed that, despite so many diverse circumstances that determine the changes in language, the language is still changing not very much and retains its unity. But nothing particularly surprising in this. After all, language is the most important means of understanding people. And if the language did not preserve its unity, then it could not fulfill this most important function.
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