The semantic range of russian lexical borrowings in korean language

Abstract

Due to Korean-Russian mutual development there is more interest to Korean and Russian languages from both countries. This leads to the problem of reading authentic texts and translating them. The biggest question is group of non-equivalent vocabulary which has to be translated adequately and accurately. But first semantic analysis of this group must be given.

In this article we will observe semantic range of Russian lexical borrowings which has already came to Korean language. Most of them are culture-oriented or sociopolitical words. Lots of words connected with Soviet period appear even in texts about modern Russia.

While making this investigation a lot of attention was paid to National Corpus of Korean Language and Big Dictionary of Standard Korean. Also comparative and descriptive methods were used.

The necessity of non-equivalent vocabulary dictionaries is purely obvious due to lack of explanation of Russian borrowings in Korean text. Most of them are given without additional description or they are given with appropriate Korean word. This in sum gives feeling of reduplication or tautologies.