…but better late than never. This one hails from Tajikistan. The main reason it caught my eye is rather academic. There is a paper that I am finishing for a class last semester, and that paper is on language and alphabet changes in Central Asia. It’s more exact than that, but I don’t want to get into it right now. Suffice to say that this story caught my eye.
No More Russian in official use in Tajikistan? Its amazing that lawmakers can even suggest this, and it sounds like something you’d expect from Turkmenistan first.
The director of Russian language testing at the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, Svetlana Melnikova, told VOA she agrees with President Rakhmon about the need to protect all national languages. But she says many of them are being affected by globalization, particularly in the areas of business and science.
Melnikova says technical terminology in CIS countries exists basically in Russian and English, and Tajiks will need to choose one of them. She predicts it will take more than a decade before Tajikistan develops its own scientific vocabulary.
It is interesting to see a date mentioned for the readiness of ‘scientific vocabulary.’ This is a problem shared by many of the other non-Russian languages of the former Soviet Union, though not all of them. However, Russian itself borrows much of its academic, medical, and law vocabulary from other European languages, including German, Polish, and French. They in turn received many of the words from Latin and Greek. My point is that it is quite arbitrary, in my opinion, to create a whole new set of vocabulary, especially in Tajik, which could easily use textbooks from Iran as models. For the Turkic languages, I would suggest keeping the ‘Russian’ vocabulary, and adopting it inside the grammatical forms of the native language.
Perhaps this is a naive suggestion, but it is how I see the problem now.
This post was written by...
Michael Hancock-Parmer – author of 158 posts on Registan.net.
Michael earned an MA in Central Eurasian Studies in 2011 and remains a student at Indiana University pursuing a dual PhD in Russian History and Central Eurasian Studies. He served 6 months in the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan in 2005. After the events in Andijan and the subsequent closure of the program, he served 2 years in southern Kazakhstan, returning to the Midwest in 2007. His general area of interest is on post-Timur Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, centered on the Syr Darya river valley.
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{ 14 comments }
Scientific and technical terms in Russian borrowed from Polish? Examples please.
Words like Revolution came to Russian from Polish. This is what I’ve read and heard – I’ll look for a link/source to back this up, but honestly, I didn’t make this up.
And it’s not like that has any effect on my argument, right?
Here is something that gets into it. It seems that the words with ‘tsiya’ endings date from the 16th/17th centuries, when the Russians [if you want to label the nationality, which I don't] or whomever was living between Kiev and Moscow were heavily influenced by Poland.
It completely skews your arguement, because you’re sliding past the real issue: the whole reason people care about this in any/all of the post-Soviet countries is that (some of them) feel that a bigger, bully culture has “imposed” its terminology on them. It’s extremely ironic that “revolution” is the “Polish” word that you are citing as an example of borrwing into Russian. “Revolutsia” is not a Polish word–it’s an international word for a particular thing that was borrowed into Polish from another European language because someone was oppressing them–probably the Russians. The Russians adopted it from international usage for the same reason, because someone was oppressing them (in this case, their own government).
So, you’re kind of missing the the whole point about why it upsets some people that whole chunks of their language are “borrowed” from another.
That said, I tend to agree that there’s no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater on this issue–and I feel the same way about alphabet transitions too. (Though as a Russian speaker, I’m biased in this department). In the end, people vote with their tongues and keyboards on these issues. If it’s important to them, they change their usage, if it’s not, they keep on using the old words (just like they keep on using the Soviet names for geographic places 20 years after renaming) because utilitarianism trumps politics in a lot of these cases.
Whoa. I’m not sliding past anything. I’m suggesting that there might be another way to look at it. And I’m not stupid – I understand that Revolution is an ‘international’ word, but I also think it’s crucial to point out that even Russian has received most of its academic vocabulary from a “bully” culture. English has the Norman Invasion – this is far from uncommon.
I think that if you ask Kazakh-speaking-Kazakhs that speak Russian in their professional life [lawyers, doctors, etc.] they might agree that it wouldn’t hurt Kazakh to keep the words and just Kazakhify them. It’s an interesting topic for research.
Michael, I think you did slide by some of the differences. Russian did not adopt huge swathes of its vocabulary as a result of foreign invasion and domination that continued into living memory. Russian did actively adopt a lot of foreign vocabulary on its own, and Russians as a people seem far more confident than Central Asians and the French about their ability to maintain a unique national identity while employing foreign-sourced vocabulary.
Again, the differences of transmission and the narratives around them are absolutely critical to explaining why Central Asian elites who are busy with redefining national identities have so much anxiety about foreign words while Russians could care less.
I’m not suggesting that Russians are the same as Central Asians, but I really do believe that language that is “imposed” on a people is not going to go anywhere unless a lot of money is spent to reverse the process. And while the Russians might have happily accepted all of this foreign vocabulary, I would argue that that is also a rationalization/simplification. The Turkic/Mongol words were certainly ‘imposed’ by the Golden Horde, the Polish words came from the “Time of Troubles,” which says quite a bit in itself, etc.
And what of English? Should we try to reverse the Norman Invasion? The move from Old English to Middle English brought all sorts of changes, including the dirtying of our swear words [being from Anglo-Saxon roots]. Perhaps it is similar to way that Turkic people that speak Russian are more likely to swear in Russian, whereas the Turkic swear words have become taboo, if still universally known.
I’m not trying to make some broad point, and I agree with you, Nathan, that one cannot begin to understand Central Asia without studying the effects of the Russian ‘occupation.’ And I do not think you are generalizing and suggesting the Russians were only a destructive force.
However, I am suggesting that the best way through this, even knowing what we know about the source of these ‘occupation’ words, is to utilize them, make them your own. AmERicans [capital ER] will tell you Deja Vu and Taco are English words, and I’m not going to argue with them. Americans that only speak English know and use these words, and thus they are now English. In the same way, Молодец and Конечно are known by most of the Russian-illiterate Central Asians, so they might also have become Қазақ or O’zbek.
I’m not suggesting that this is easy to do, just that it might be a better idea than the status quo – painfully fighting language development every step of the way, waiting for the nationalist-linguists to reinvent the wheel. It seems that the status quo is equivalent to letting them waste millions of dollars and dozens of years so that they can come up with a Turkic word for indictment or anterior ventricle. That, to my mind, is not a good idea.
Again, I’m not in disagreement, I’m just trying to make my opinion clearer, because I think if I state it correctly, you’ll actually be in agreement with me.
Maybe?
Michael, I think you’re still conflating a lot of different things together here. Context and dates matter to this discussion. I’m not saying that anything other than Proto-Nostratic is an imposition ripe for rolling back; I’m saying the context of the adoption matters. Basically, I’m saying that bringing Russian into the discussion is about as relevant as bringing the Norman Invasion into it.
I don’t disagree that imposing vocabulary change probably won’t work. But if that’s all your argument is, it wasn’t at all clear until this last comment.
You keep lumping all of Central Asia together and interchanging talking about Kazakhstan and some about Uzbekistan with your original point (which is what I was responding to) about Tajikistan and Tajik.
These really aren’t the same thing. Russian language in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan are two different things, and Russiansin Kazakhstan play a very different role in role in society than they do in Tajikistan. I don’t think this is an issue where you can talk about these situations interchangably.
Secondly, you can’t keep comparing the situation in Central Asia to the Norman conquest. There are a lot of reasons these are not even remotely the same thing, but the most important one is that no one cares about the Norman conquest (anymore) but feelings are still pretty raw about stuff that happened in living memory.
Thirdly, Tajik is very different than Kazakh or Uzbek. No offense to Tajiks, I don’t think I have to repeat for anyone reading this blog that Tajik is a dialect of Persian, and all of this scientific and technical language has already been developed in other Persian-speaking countries. There’s no need to “make words up” (like the Uzbek academy sometimes likes to do).
Countries make these decisions mostly based on what links they want to forge in the future–in the early 90s, Uzbekistan tried to actively introduce Turkish vocabulary into its lexicon, but not just to spite the Russians…
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Finally, I can’t let this one go without saying anything–you are saying the Russians are supposed to have absorbed a bunch of Polish voculary during the time of troubles, during which Muscovy Russians fought a sucessful war with the Polish-Lithuanian Empire? You’re kind of digging the “Polish” hole deeper and deeper here. So far your whole arguement rests on Russian “borrowing” non-Polish words from Polish that other Slavic languages acquired in a mysteriously similar form, but not from Polish. Ukrainian, yeah, that’s a language that has been heavily influenced by Polish. Russian, not so much…
There’s a lot more to be said about the way that Russian adopts words from other languages (it’s true that this happens a ton) but that’s really off the subject.
I’m not comparing Central Asia to the Norman Conquest – please don’t think I’m going Kaplan on you guys. As for not making my points clear, I hardly think I’m the only one with this trouble.
I also am very aware that Tajikistan is not the same as Kazakhstan. Give me some credit. That’s why Tajikistan can even suggest a law like this – it proves that it is night and day from Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, which have given Russian some kind of official status in their governments.
And again, I am not coming out of left field here with Russian getting words from Polish, the link that I put above was what I had read. If they were wrong, argue with them – we all are just regurgitating stuff we read that we thought sounded right or interesting, and then we synthesize and the world gets smarter. I would offer that the same way that Kazakhs dislike hearing how many “Kazakh” words come from Persian or Russian, Russian-speakers consider Polish influence to be anathema, and vice-versa. That doesn’t change the fact that two cultures in constant contact [even hostile contact] are going to share words. Why else would Russians still say Bazar, Karandash, Tuman, Siberia, etc?
The points in the original article [Way Up Top of this thread] were:
1: Wow, Tajiks are getting rid of Russians, this is neat and proof of how different they are from Kazakhs and Kyrgyz
2: Why is a date set for language readiness [10 years]? If, as Noah and I suggest, the Persian language already has this vocabulary, shouldn’t that be a none issue? OR, like Uzbekistan, are they more interested in making their OWN unique ‘Tajik’ vocabulary.
That, to me, is also quite interesting – the Tajik government may be nationalizing the issue to the point of making the language more separate from Iranian Farsi than it already is. I’m not going to go Kaplan and say, “Hey, that’s just like…”
My bringing up the Norman Conquest was just to point out how conquerors bringing in new words is something that happens, and the language goes on, if the people go on. Kazakhstan is independent and not about to be reabsorbed into Russia anytime soon [knock on wood], so the issue of Kazakh proving its independence from Russian, to me, is a None Issue.
Good discussion, though! I wish every comment threat argument was this civil. Some of the Afghanistan comments get quite nasty.
Interesting discussion. I’ve heard people in Tajikistan using the Russian words for things as basic as ‘bridge’, ‘matches’ and ‘aeroplane’ when talking to each other in Tajik, so a ‘Tajikification’ programme would have a lot of work to do. As for technical terms, a development project I worked on brought Afghan and Tajik veterinarians together for discussions. While talking in Dari/Tajik, they ended up using English technical terms for clarity, as the Tajiks used the Russian technical terms and the Afghans used Dari/Farsi terms, leading to a good bit of confusion. If the Tajik government does want to adopt Farsi technical terms eventually, perhaps this may be part of the reason there’s a drive towards replacing Cyrillic with the Farsi alphabet?
Gentlemen:
This has been one of my very favorite threads EVAH on Registan. As a Russian speaker myself, I have felt twinges when the Kazakh government made its push to reduce the use of Russian, while at the same time understanding why they might want to do so.
Thanks for the discussion.