Tolerance: New and traditional values in Russian in comparison with English

Abstract

This chapter examines the recent trend in contemporary Russian of increasing lexical borrowing from English. In particular, it compares and contrasts the meanings of a recently borrowed value term 'tolerantnyj' with its English equivalent 'tolerant' and the traditionally closest Russian equivalent 'terpimyj' 'tolerant/indulgent/forbearing'. A detailed contrastive semantic analysis demonstrates that although 'tolerant' and 'terpimyj' are translational equivalents, their meanings do differ and reflect different cultural attitudes across the two societies involved. The work also shows that the meaning of the new Russian term 'tolerantnyj' does not fully coincide with the meaning of the English 'tolerant', as it reflects the Russian value system. This study applies the methodology of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage in conducting semantic analysis.