List of German words from Russian
Words that the German language has borrowed from Russian as the language of origin or from Russian as the intermediary language are called Russianisms . The historical course of this borrowing process follows the Language Change Act ( Piotrowski Act ) and is dealt with in Best (2003) and Kotsyuba (2007).
Here are some examples of Russianism.
| German | Russian | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
| Babushka | бабушка | Granny. Has a common root, but is not a diminutive of the word баба (Baba), which literally means "woman". |
| balalaika | балалайка | Plucked instrument with three strings and a triangular sound box. |
| Dacha | дача | Weekend house. Today it is understood to mean small to large villas of oligarchs that are built on a "garden plot". It used to be used to describe gardens in which vegetables and fruits were grown and tended in summer. |
| Dawai | давай | Literally translated this exclamation means give! (unfinished aspect of giving ). This word is also used in the sense of "Hurry up!", "Come on!", "Go faster!"
According to a dissertation (Goman, Minsk) the word comes from German and has been adopted into Russian. According to this, coachmen who traveled to Russia are said to have driven their horses with "weiter, weiter" ("far (d) a, far (d) a"). Russians understood "t (d) awai" by reversing the syllables. This explanation corresponds to one of the meanings of "dawai" like "Go!" |
| Cosmonaut | космонавт | Cosmonaut, as a counterpart to the American astronaut (from Greek astron or Latin aster for star ), is derived from the Greek kosmos for space and the Latin nauta for seafarers. |
| Kopeck | копейка | The coin unit is derived from kop'jo ( копьё for spear ), because the first kopecks from Novgorod in 1478 bore the Moscow coat of arms with an image of Saint George killing a dragon with a spear. |
| Kremlin | кремль | often the Moscow Kremlin as the best known of these fortresses and often metonymically the Russian or Soviet state power, especially the President of Russia , whose official seat is the Moscow Kremlin. |
| mammoth | мамонт | This word is a Russian form of the term horn from the earth used in the Mansen language . |
| Matryoshka | Матрёшка | Made of wood and colorfully painted, nestable, egg-shaped Russian dolls with talisman character. |
| pogrom | погром | Pogrom means devastation, riot ( погром, погромить for stir up; etymologically related to гром for thunder ). |
| ruble | рубль | Ruble means chopped off (piece) (of the silver bar) . |
| Samizdat | самиздат | The word originated from сам (itself) and издательство (publisher) and was in the GDR a name for system-critical and thus forced self-published literature. |
| Samovar | самовар | Samovar means self-cooker . |
| Scheltopusik | желтопузик | Scheltopusik is a species of lizard and means yellow belly . |
| Semechki | Семечки | Semetschki means sunflower seeds . |
| sputnik | спутник | Sputnik means companion . |
| steppe | степь | A treeless grass and herb landscape in temperate latitudes on both sides of the equator. |
| Subbotnik | субботник | Subbotnik comes from the Russian суббота , Saturday, which was borrowed from the Hebrew Sabbath . |
| taiga | тайга | Russian borrowed this word from northern peoples. |
| Troika | тройка | Troika comes from tri - three - and means threesome. |
| ukase | указ | Decrees of the person in charge of an authority are sometimes called ukas in German. |
| Woilach | войлок | A horse blanket, a felt blanket, borrowed in Russian from the Tatar "oilik" ("felt blanket under the saddle"). |
| sable | соболь | A species of predator belonging to the genus of the real marten. |
literature
- Karl-Heinz Best : Slavic borrowings in German. In: Sebastian Kempgen , Ulrich Schweier, Tilman Berger (editors): Rusistika - Slavistika - Lingvistika. Festschrift for Werner Lehfeldt on his 60th birthday . Verlag Otto Sagner, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-87690-837-X , pages 464-473.
- Oxana Kotsyuba: Russianisms in German vocabulary. In: Glottometrics 15 , 2007, pages 13-23. (PDF full text )
- Alexandre Pirojkov: Russianisms in contemporary German. Existence, condition and development tendencies . Weissensee-Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-934479-69-3 , (At the same time: University of Potsdam, dissertation, 2002).
See also
Web links
Wiktionary: Russianism - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations
