Tag: (E) tolerate

(2005) Russian – Cultural values

Gladkova, Anna (2005). New and traditional values in contemporary Russian: Natural Semantic Metalanguage in cross-cultural semantics. In Ilana Mushin (Ed.), Proceedings of the 2004 Conference of the Australian Linguistics Society (16 pp.). http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/93. PDF (open access)

Revised and expanded as:

Gladkova, Anna (2008). Tolerance: New and traditional values in Russian in comparison with English. In Cliff Goddard (Ed.), Cross-linguistic semantics (pp. 301-329). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Work in contrastive semantics can tell us a great deal about differences between cultures in which the words that are being contrasted are used. Linguists can contribute to the social sciences and to the investigation of values prevailing in different cultures and different societies by detailed semantic analysis, which in turn can be successful if the appropriate methodology is used. NSM is able to reveal subtle differences in the meaning of value words and proves to be an adequate tool for this kind of task.

A detailed semantic analysis allows us to show differences between the concepts терпимы terpimyj and tolerant. Tolerant has a more “social” character since it is an attitude towards something seen as different from social norms. Tерпимы terpimyj is more “personal” in its attitude as it is a reaction towards personal offence. Tolerant is related to the recognition of personal autonomy of thinking and behaviour as well as the idea of social harmony as an opportunity for people to behave and think in the way they want. Tерпимы terpimyj is linked to the value of смиренеи smirenie; it is about not developing bad feelings and negative reactions to those seen as doing bad things and about maintaining the social harmony of positive feeling among people. Thus, tolerant is more “rational” and “liberal” and терпимы terpimyj is more “emotional” and “moral”. The proposed definition of tolerant, formulated in simple universal concepts, also allows us to gauge the possible difference between the new Russian word tolerantnyj and the English tolerant.


Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners

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(2008) Russian, English – Cultural values: tolerance

Gladkova, Anna (2008). Tolerance: New and traditional values in Russian in comparison with English. In Cliff Goddard (Ed.), Cross-linguistic semantics (pp. 301-329). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/slcs.102.19gla

An earlier version of this paper was published as:

Gladkova, Anna (2005). New and traditional values in contemporary Russian: Natural Semantic Metalanguage in cross-cultural semantics. In Ilana Mushin (Ed.), Proceedings of the 2004 Conference of the Australian Linguistics Society. http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/93.

This chapter examines the recent trend in contemporary Russian towards increased 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 терпимый terpimyj ‘tolerant/indulgent/forbearing’. A detailed contrastive semantic analysis demonstrates that, although tolerant and терпимый 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. The analysis is conducted using NSM as its main analytical tool.


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

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