# Obsolesсence of colloquial speech



## William Stein

Saluton and willem81: I was really surprised by how many words in that short story*ЧЕСТНЫЙ ВОР *were marked as obsolete in the dictionary. Then I read another Dostoevsky short story *ЕЛКА И СВАДЬБА *​yesterday and didn't find a single obsolete word. Anyway, tell me what you think of this hypothesis:

*ЧЕСТНЫЙ ВОР is about the lower classes, so it's full of slang that was never written down and therefore subject to wide variation over time and from one city to the next because there was no fixed written reference (before Dostoevsky). **ЕЛКА И СВАДЬБА on the other hand is about the upper classes so it largely draws on elegant, conventional Russian that's taught in schools and exhaustively recorded in writing. That means that it's much less likely to change and/or become obsolete.
*​Sorry the font size kept growing, it wasn't intended to be an "intellectual crescendo", I feel like I'm in Alice in Wonderland or something


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## Maroseika

William Stein said:


> ЧЕСТНЫЙ ВОР is about the lower classes, so it's full of slang that was never written down and therefore subject to wide variation over time and from one city to the next because there was no fixed written reference (before Dostoevsky)
> ЕЛКА И СВАДЬБА on the other hand is about the upper classes so it largely draws on elegant, conventional Russian that's taught in schools and exhaustively recorded in writing. That means that it's much less likely to change and/or become obsolete.


Actually I could not notice any word in "Честный вор", that would not has been fixed in literature and dictionaries long before Dostoyevskiy. There is really a lot of colloquial words and expressions, but hardly any localism. 
By the way, "Елка и свадьба" also sounds obsolete in words usage.


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## William Stein

Maroseika said:


> Actually I could not notice any word in "Честный вор", that would not has been fixed in literature and dictionaries long before Dostoyevskiy. There is really a lot of colloquial words and expressions, but hardly any localism.
> By the way, "Елка и свадьба" also sounds obsolete in words usage.




I found at least 15 words that are marked as obsolete in "Честный вор" in the Oxford English-Russian Dictionary, most of them slang words, and not a single obsolete word in the "Елка и свадьба", although they're may eb one if you look hard enough. That doesn't seem like such a random distribution to me. Maybe some linguists were active recording slang before Dostoevsky but that doesn't disprove my general hypothesis that slang is much more likely to change than conventional language because the latter is widely formulated in writing (and not just in some specialized dictionaries for linguists). It's even intuitively obvious if you think about it.


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## Maroseika

William Stein said:


> I found at least 15 words that are marked as obsolete in "Честный вор" in the Oxford English-Russian Dictionary, most of them slang words, and not a single obsolete word in the "Елка и свадьба", although they're may eb one if you look hard enough. That doesn't seem like such a random distribution to me. Maybe some linguists were active recording slang before Dostoevsky but that doesn't disprove my general hypothesis that slang is much more likely to change than conventional language because the latter is widely formulated in writing (and not just in some specialized dictionaries for linguists). It's even intuitively obvious if you think about it.



It seems to me there is some sort of confusion in terminology. 
First, obsolete word is far not the same as occasional or first time recorded word. I could miss something, but I strongly doubt there is any word in "Честный вор", not used in literature before (just literature, not a dictionary of rare words). 
Second, I'm not sure it is correct to call these words slangy. If slang is "a type of language consisting of words and phrases that are regarded as very informal, are more common in speech than writing, and are typically restricted to a particular context or group of people" (Oxford Dictionary of English), I would not refer any of the obsolete words in this novel to slang.


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## William Stein

Maroseika said:


> It seems to me there is some sort of confusion in terminology.
> First, obsolete word is far not the same as occasional or first time recorded word. I could miss something, but I strongly doubt there is any word in "Честный вор", not used in literature before (just literature, not a dictionary of rare words).
> Second, I'm not sure it is correct to call these words slangy. If slang is "a type of language consisting of words and phrases that are regarded as very informal, are more common in speech than writing, and are typically restricted to a particular context or group of people" (Oxford Dictionary of English), I would not refer any of the obsolete words in this novel to slang.



You are just quibbling about terminology and ignoring my point, which is not about first-time recorded words,  a pedantic question of no interest to me. My point, at the risk of repeating myself, is that "Честный вор" contains a million times more obsolete words than the other story (although those words may have been recorded in some rare doctoral thesis rotting away on a library shelf somewhere). Since the language of elegant clichés of the type used in "Елка и свадьба" is recorded in hundreds and thousands of publications and newspapers, taught in schools and codified in grammars, it is far more resistant to change, which explains why I can read that short story practically without consulting the dictionary. It suffices to repeat the experiment and look up the words in the two stories in the Oxford English Russian Dictionary and see how many are marked as obsolete.
You say that slang is typically restricted to particular context or group of people, and I agree entirely: In this case the uneducated working class of Saint Petersburg. You can say that they actually constituted a majority but it's still considered clearly slang by the educated elite who would never dream of using that kind of language.


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## Maroseika

William Stein said:


> You are just quibbling about terminology and ignoring my point, which is not about first-time recorded words,  a pedantic question of no interest to me.


Well, I wanted to clarify this just because you mentioned the first record. I thought you meant Dostoyevskiy might specially collect and use rare words, which is actually seems to me unusual for him, I never heard about that.



> My point, at the risk of repeating myself, is that "Честный вор" contains a million times more obsolete words than the other story (although those words may have been recorded in some rare doctoral thesis rotting away on a library shelf somewhere). Since the language of elegant clichés of the type used in "Елка и свадьба" is recorded in hundreds and thousands of publications and newspapers, taught in schools and codified in grammars, it is far more resistant to change, which explains why I can read that short story practically without consulting the dictionary. It suffices to repeat the experiment and look up the words in the two stories in the Oxford English Russian Dictionary and see how many are marked as obsolete.
> You say that slang is typically restricted to particular context or group of people, and I agree entirely: In this case the uneducated working class of Saint Petersburg. You can say that they actually constituted a majority but it's still considered clearly slang by the educated elite who would never dream of using that kind of language.


I'm afraid discussion of the regularity of words obsolescense is beyond the scope of this thread, but as for the words in this concrete novel, I think it would be more clear what you mean if your made several examples of the words, presumably being the slang of the uneducated working class of Saint Petersburg. I reread it right now and failed to notice any.


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## William Stein

Maroseika said:


> Well, I wanted to clarify this just because you mentioned the first record. I thought you meant Dostoyevskiy might specially collect and use rare words, which is actually seems to me unusual for him, I never heard about that.
> 
> 
> I'm afraid discussion of the regularity of words obsolescense is beyond the scope of this thread, but as for the words in this concrete novel, I think it would be more clear what you mean if your made several examples of the words, presumably being the slang of the uneducated working class of Saint Petersburg. I reread it right now and failed to notice any.



Doestoevsky is just one example of the point that I am trying to make, which you deliberately keep trying to ignore like a chatbot that is programmed to disagree on principle :
The reason why "Честный вор"  is much more difficult to read is because the lower-class language it contains is far less resistant to change than the upper-class language as reflected in the "Елка и свадьба", because the latter is recorded in writing. grammars and reference works with far greater frequency.

I don't have to go through the entire story now because I actually have to work for a living but anybody who looks up the words in the Oxford Russian as I suggested will see many of them marked as obsolete. As to how many of them exactly fit the definition of slang of the uneducated working class of Saint Petersburg, who knows, but it's basically all the words and expressions commonly used in the story that would not be used by the upper-class in writing and/or polite society because they are too "slangy" and/or vulgar. I think you would agree that there are lots of such words, if you were capable of agreeing - I don't believe I've ever been witness to that phenomenon


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## Maroseika

William Stein said:


> I don't have to go through the entire  story now because I actually have to work for a living but anybody who  looks up the words in the Oxford Russian as I suggested will see many of  them marked as obsolete.



Your hypothesis is very interesting, but the only way to verify it  is checking exact words. I don't believe this issue might be resolved  merely speculatively. At least nobody except you can point exact words  marked as obsolete in your dictionary. By the way, it may be just a  peculiarity of your dictionary. For example, even наладить in the sense  of "to repeat one the same" is not marked in Russian dictionaries as  obsolete - just as low-colloquial. It would be interesting to check other words marked in your dictionary as obsolete.


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## ahvalj

I generally agree that the language of the educated classes has eventually won and that even the modern colloquial speech draws much more from this source than from the speech of opposite side of the social spectrum, at least as we imagine the latter. There are, however, several buts:

(1) as far as we can judge, the social stratification of the language was never especially pronounced in Russian (as well as the dialectal diversity);

(2) it is hard to tell to what extent the writers reflect the real speech of their lower class heroes: there is even a parody of the late 1920's by Il'f and Petrov about старик Ромуальдыч, and, for example, I don't believe that real people ever spoke the way Zoschenko's heroes do;

(3) Dostoyevsky's texts are a nightmare from the lexical and stylistic viewpoints, and I wouldn't recommend to rely on him in these matters: almost any other major writer of that period mastered the language considerably better.


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## Словеса

ahvalj said:


> (3) Dostoyevsky's texts are a nightmare from the lexical and stylistic viewpoints, and I wouldn't recommend to rely on him in these matters: almost any other major writer of that period mastered the language considerably better.


To prove this point, you'd need to specify your criteria for what is good from the stylistic and from the lexical viewpoints... If you do not, then the point does not mean anything.


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## ahvalj

Словеса said:


> To prove this point, you'd need to specify your criteria for what is good from the stylistic and from the lexical viewpoints... If you do not, then the point does not mean anything.


_— Если бы сейчас была дискуссия, — начала женщина, волнуясь и_ _загораясь румянцем, — я бы доказала Петру Александровичу..._
_ — Виноват, вы не сию минуту хотите открыть эту дискуссию? — вежливо_ _спросил Филипп Филиппович._


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## Словеса

Как хотите... Доказывать, между прочим, предстояло бы вам.


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## ahvalj

Словеса said:


> Как хотите... Доказывать, между прочим, вам.


Меня слишком много тут вырезали за выход за рамки тем обсуждения.


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## Словеса

William Stein said:


> The reason why "Честный вор"  is much more difficult to read is because the lower-class language it contains is far less resistant to change than the upper-class language as reflected in the "Елка и свадьба", because the latter is recorded in writing.


I think that for you obsolescence of the language ought not to be a problem because it's not your native language anyway.
I might be able to throw in another factor that might have played a  role: lower-class people had a culture that was possibly largely  distinct from the European one, while higher-class people had to seek to  adopt the European ways of thinking and therefore expressing  themselves. So higher-class  people's ways were more comfortable for you and easier for you to  understand. Quite a paradox: culture and possibly language were   different, but we had to borrow philosophy that would explain both of   them from Europe, we did not develop our own philosophy. Communism is an essentially Western ideology, so after the  Bolshevik revolution the ways of expressing ideas had to level for  different people on the European ones. Just wild speculation, of course,  but yours is the same. ;-)
(Maybe your initial question is a topic for EHL, how do you think? There are also threads like this on CD).


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## ahvalj

Словеса said:


> I think that for you obsolescence of the language ought not to be a problem because it's not your native language anyway.
> I might be able to throw in another factor that might have played a  role: lower-class people had a culture that was possibly largely  distinct from the European one, while higher-class people had to seek to  adopt the European ways of thinking and therefore expressing  themselves. So higher-class  people's ways were more comfortable for you and easier for you to  understand. Quite a paradox: culture and possibly language were   different, but we had to borrow philosophy that would explain both of   them from Europe, we did not develop our own philosophy. Communism is an essentially Western ideology, so after the  Bolshevik revolution the ways of expressing ideas had to level for  different people on the European ones. Just wild speculation, of course,  but yours is the same. ;-)
> (Maybe your initial question is a topic for EHL, how do you think? There are also threads like this on CD).


My grandmother, who was a Russian born in 1908 in a mixed Russian-Finnish-Estonian village halfway between Saint Petersburg and what is now Estonia and graduated from a three-years school there, spoke an almost literary language with virtually no accent and local words. So, at least in her case your Martian theory didn't work. Her mother was a peasant and her father was a peasant in summer and a coachman in Saint Petersburg in winter.

The same was true for my other grandmother born in 1920 in a village near Ryazan.


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## henrylee100

It sounds like a legit hypothesis to me, although you'd probably have to look at far more than just two books to prove or disprove it.


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