Wierzbicka, Anna & Anna Gladkova (2020). “There is no sex in the Soviet Union”: From sex to seks. In Lauren Sadow, Bert Peeters, & Kerry Mullan (Eds.), Studies in ethnopragmatics, cultural semantics, and intercultural communication: Vol. 3. Minimal English (and beyond) (pp. 191-212). Singapore: Springer.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9979-5_4
Abstract:
In Russian, the loan word seks is linked for many speakers with a famous episode from the pre-perestrojka period when in the course of one of the first Soviet–American tele-bridges a Russian respondent famously declared: “U nas seksa net ...”, ‘there is no sex in the Soviet Union’. Focussing on seks as a loan word in Russian and exploring the meaning of its ubiquitous English counterpart in a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective, this paper shows that the meaning of sex is a conceptual artefact of modern Anglo culture and that the differences between the two words can be illuminated through Minimal English.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
