Article

Name: Linguocultural transfer: perception of the world in the ancient traditions

Authors: S. G. Proskurin

Novosibirsk State University, Novosibirsk State Technical University

Abstract: The article deals with the problem of linguocultural transference in ancient traditions. Even though in ancient cultures a word to word borrowing of cultural images of the world did not take a place, but cultural transference of knowledge certainly happened by. The structures of knowledge, which stood behind the dictionary, moved from one tradition into another. They formed analogue structures in the form of frames of perception of the world which were similar for many cultures. Our hypothesis is that these transferences take place in the conceptualized domains in which merger of things and concepts occur. The concept of the world that was current in the Indo-European tradition several millennia ago is the subject of reconstruction. As reported in some works the world concept for Indo-Europeans was thought as a constituent part of mythological topic of the world tree, Indo-European *medhio, that divides the space and creatures into three parts. The authors of “Semantic dictionary of Indo- European language” T. V. Gamkrelidze and Vyach. Vs. Ivanov built up a tree of semantic features of nonwild animated beings. The wild animals, in their turn, are subdivided into three groups, namely, creatures of the upper world [*hue(i) bird, eagle, crane], animals of the middle world [*medhio – wolf, bear, leopard etc.] and animals of the lower world [*bhudhn – snake, worm, otter]. The stem *medhio is found in Old Indian Madhya and Old Islandic Mithgarthr “Middle world”. Sometimes features of a reconstruction are compatible with peculiarities of another, when they are considered altogether. Thus Old Germanic *midjagardaz was considered as a partitive phrase, that denotes an absolute center of the tradition, that is symbolically embodied in a tree, mountain, pillar, pit. The data give direct evidence of acceptability of such reconstruction in Germanic studies. So the basic semiotic categories as well as a micromotive of the world tree and taxonomies of culture are compatible with etymologies, lexicogrammatical phenomena of the languages. However such compatibility is evident only in some cultural areas, particularly, in Baltic and Old Germanic regions. One of the criteria of establishing conceptual structures is a new approach to the analysis that is a combination of the etymological analysis, on the one hand, and the analysis of excerpts from the texts, on the other hand. Linguocultural transference tree – middle-cross is typical of a number of ancient traditions including Old Germanic.

Keywords: linguocultural transference, structure of knowledge, frame, migration of the motive

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