Keywords
nitchevo
history
borrowing
loanword
citation
OED
How to Cite
Abstract
This article focuses on the way nitchevo, a nineteenth-century Russian borrowing, was adopted into the English language. In order to investigate the history of the word, six digital text archives were considered. The results of the research are promising: not only do they allow one to trace antedatings for both senses, which updates the treatment of nitchevo in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), but they also shed light on its semantic development, spelling variation, and route of transmission. Tellingly, albeit unsurprisingly, the evidence suggests that the press is responsible for boosting the recognition of the word on both sides of the Atlantic. All this indicates
that the potential of modern research tools, including British and American newspaper archives, remains to be fully explored.
References
(American) Historical Newspapers. https://newspaperarchive.com.
The British Newspapers Archives. https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk.
Chronicling America. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.
COHA = The Corpus of Historical American English. https://corpus.byu.edu/coha/.
Google Books. https://books.google.com/.
Google Books British Corpus, Google Books American Corpus. https://www.english-corpora.org/googlebooks/.
Google Books Ngram Viewer. https://books.google.com/ngrams/.
HathiTrust. https://www.hathitrust.org/.
Internet Archive. https://archive.org/.
Baring, Maurice. 1911. The Russian people. Methuen.
Bauer, Karoline. 1885. Memoirs of Karoline Bauer. Roberts Brothers.
Dorr, Rheta C. 1917. Inside the Russian Revolution. Macmillan.
Frankland, Charles C. 1832. Narrative of a visit to the courts of Russia and Sweden, in the years 1830 and 1831. Henry Colburn & Richard Bentley.
Fraser, John F. 1918. “Nichevo!”--Russia’s motto of don’t care; fatal “never mind” spirit now saturates the oppressed Slavic empire, but an awakening under German lash is predicted. The New York Times of March 17, 1918. https://www.nytimes.com/1918/03/17/archives/nichevorussias-motto-of-dont-care-fatal-never-mind-spirit-now.html.
Gmelin, Johann G. 1751. Reise durch Sibirien: von dem Jahr 1733. bis 1743… Vol. 1. Verlegts Abram Vandenhoecks.
Guthrie, Katharine B. 1874. Through Russia: From St. Petersburg to Astrakhan and the Crimea. Vol. 1. Hurst & Blackett.
Holmes, Burton. 1901. The Burton Holmes lectures. Vol. 9. The Little-Preston.
Hughes, E. 1898. Rusticating in Russia. The Living Age 216. 186‒190.10.1093/nq/s9-I.11.216g DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/s9-I.11.216g
Klemm, Louis R. 1888. Chips from a teacher’s workshop. Lee and Shepard Publishers/Charles T. Dillingham.
Kohl, Johann G. 1839. Russland: Russiche Volksberedsamkeit. Magazin für die Literatur des Auslandes 15(30). 120.
Kohl, Johann G. 1841. Petersburg in Bildern und Skizzen. Vol. 1. In der Arnoldischen Buchhandlung.
Kohl, Johann G. 1842a. Russia: St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kharkoff, Riga, Odessa, and the German provinces on the Baltic, the steppes, the Crimea, and the interior of the empire. Chapman and Hall.
Kohl, Johann G. 1842b. Russia and the Russians, in 1842. Vols. 1‒2. Henry Colburn.
Miller, Wright W. 1973. Who are the Russians? A history of the Russian people. Taplinger.
Maynard, Solomon. 1979. Herbert Marcuse. In Solomon Maynard (ed.), Marxism and art: Essays classic and contemporary. Wayne State University Press. 515‒540.
OED1 = 1884–1928. John A. H. Murray, Henry Bradley, William A. Craigie & Charles T. Onions (eds.), The Oxford English Dictionary (originally published as A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles). Vols. 1‒10. Clarendon Press.
OED2 = 1989. John Simpson & Edmund S. Weiner (eds.), The Oxford English Dictionary. (2nd edn.) Vols. 1‒20. Clarendon Press.
OED3 = 2000–. John Simpson & Michael Proffitt (eds.), The Oxford English Dictionary. (3rd edn.) Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/.
Patenaude, Bernard M. 2002. The big show in Bololand. The American relief expedition to Soviet Russia in the famine of 1921. Stanford University Press.10.1515/9781503620063 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781503620063
[Pellew Smith, Mary A.] 1859. Six years’ travels in Russia. Vols. 1–2. Hurst & Blackett.
Stites, Richard. 1989. Revolutionary dreams: Utopian vision and experimental life in the Russian Revolution. Oxford University Press.
Walton, Albert. 1941. Do you want to be a foreman? McGraw-Hill Book Company.
Webster’s Second = 1934. William A. Neilson et al. (eds.), Webster’s new international dictionary of the English language. (2nd edn.) Merriam-Webster.
Webster’s Third = 1961. Philip B. Gove (ed.), Webster’s third new international dictionary of English unabridged. (3rd edn.) G. Bell/Merriam.
Ackerman, Louise M. 1958. Facetious variations of ‘sputnik’. American Speech 33(2). 154‒156. DOI: 10.2307/453194 DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/453194
Algeo, John. 1996. Spanish loanwords in English by 1900. In Félix Rodríguez Gonzáles (ed.), Spanish loanwords in the English language: A tendency towards a hegemony reversal. Mouton De Gruyter. 13‒40. DOI: 10.1515/9783110890617-004 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110890617-004
Bator, Magdalena. 2010. Obsolete Scandinavian loanwords in English. Peter Lang.
Benson, Morton. 1962. Russianisms in the American press. American Speech 37(1). 41‒47. DOI: 10.2307/453994 DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/453994
Bieswanger, Markus. 2004. German influence on Australian English. Universitätsverlag Winter.
Brewer, Charlotte. 2007. Treasure-house of the language: The living OED. Yale University Press.
Brewer, Charlotte. 2020. ‘When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my Dictionary’: Poets and dictionaries, dictionaries and poets. In Andrew Blades & Piers Pennington (eds.), Poetry and the dictionary. Oxford University Press. 26‒56. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781789620566.003.0002
Brewer, Charlotte. 2022. The future of historical dictionaries, with special reference to the online OED and thesaurus. In Howard Jackson (ed.), The Bloomsbury handbook of lexicography. (2nd edn.) Bloomsbury Academic. 375‒388. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350181731.ch-022
Cannon, Garland. 1988. Chinese borrowings in English. American Speech 63(1). 3‒33. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/455420
Cannon, Garland. 1998. Post-1949 German loans in written English. Word 49(1). 19‒54. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00437956.1998.11673877
Chan, Mimi & Helen Kwok. 1985. A study of lexical borrowing from Chinese into English with special reference to Hong Kong. Hong Kong University Press.
Davies, Mark & Don Chapman. 2016. The effect of representativeness and size in historical corpora: An empirical study of changes in lexical frequency. In Don Chapman, Colette Moore & Miranda Wilcox (eds.), Studies in the history of the English language VII: Generalizing vs. particularizing methodologies in historical linguistic analysis. Mouton De Gruyter. 131−152. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110494235-007
Dubinina, Irina & Maria Polinsky. 2013. Russian in the USA. In Michael Moser & Maria Polinsky (eds.), Slavic languages in migration. LIT Verlag. 1–28.
Durkin, Philip. 2004. Loanword etymologies in the third edition of the OED: Some questions of classification. In Christian Kay, Carole Hough & Irené Wotherspoon (eds.), New perspectives on English historical linguistics: Selected papers from 12 ICEHL, Glasgow, 21‒26 August 2002. Vol. 2: Lexis and transmission. John Benjamins. 79–90. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.252.07dur
Durkin, Philip. 2006. Lexical borrowing in present-day English: A preliminary investigation based on the Oxford English Dictionary. In Daniel Kölligan & Ranjan Sen (eds.), Topics in comparative philology and historical linguistics. Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics, University of Oxford. 26–42.
Durkin, Philip. 2009. The Oxford guide to etymology. Oxford University Press.
Durkin, Philip. 2014. Borrowed words: A history of loanwords in English. Oxford University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199574995.001.0001
Durkin, Philip. 2016. Spelling variation as documented in historical dictionaries: The OED as a test case. In Vivian Cook & Des Ryan (eds.), The Routledge handbook of the English writing system. Routledge. 163‒174.
Durkin, Philip. 2020. Contact and lexical borrowing. In Raymond Hickey (ed.), The handbook of language contact. (2nd edn.) John Wiley and Sons. 169‒179. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119485094.ch8
Eddy, Anna A. & Zoya G. Proshina. 2016. Russian and English contact: Past and present. In Zoya G. Proshina & Anna A. Eddy (eds.), Russian English. History, functions, and features. Cambridge University Press. 9–24. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139683623.002
Gilliver, Peter. 2005. Materials and methodologies for the new Oxford English Dictionary. In Henrik Gottlieb, Jens Erik Mogensen & Arne Zettersen (eds.), Symposium on Lexicography XI: Proceedings of the Eleventh International Symposium on Lexicography May 2-4, 2002 at the University of Copenhagen. Max Niemeyer. 241−248. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110928310.241
Gilliver, Peter. 2016. The making of the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199283620.001.0001
Habash, Gabe. 2012. Average book length: Guess how many words there are in a novel. PWxyz (blog). https://www.huffpost.com/entry/book-length_n_1334636.
Haspelmath, Martin. 2009. Lexical borrowing: Concepts and issues. In Martin Haspelmath & Uri Tadmor (eds.), Loanwords in the world’s languages. A comparative handbook. De Gruyter Mouton. 35‒54. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110218442.35
Hughes, Geoffrey. 2000. A history of English words. Blackwell Publishers. Koteyko, Nelya. 2014. Language and politics in post-Soviet Russia: A corpus approach. Palgrave Macmillan.
Kutzinski, Vera M. 2012. The worlds of Langston Hughes. Modernism and translation in the Americas. Cornell University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9780801451157.001.0001
McConchie, Roderick W. 1997. Lexicography and physicke: The record of sixteenth-century English medical terminology. Clarendon Press.
Meier, A. J. 2000. The status of “foreign words” in English: The case of eight German words. American Speech 75(2). 169‒183. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-75-2-169
Mencken, Henry L. 1921. The American language: An inquiry into the development of English in the United States. A. A. Knopf.
Michel, Jean-Baptiste, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K. Gray, The Google Books Team, Joseph P. Pickett, Dale Hoiberg, Dan Clancy, Peter Norvig, Jon Orwant, Steven Pinker, Martin A. Nowak & Erez Lieberman Aiden. 2011. Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books. Science 331(176). 176–182. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1199644
Miller, D. Gary. 2012. External influences on English: From its beginnings to the Renaissance. Oxford University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199654260.001.0001
Mladenova, Olga. 2004. Russian second-language textbooks and identity in the universe of discourse: A contribution to macropragmatics. Otto Sagner. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3726/b12711
Mugglestone, Lynda C. 2012. Alexander Ellis and the virtues of doubt. In Mary J. Toswell & Elizabeth M. Tyler (eds.), Studies in English language and literature: Doubt wisely. Papers in honour of E. G. Stanley. Routledge. 85‒98.
Ogilvie, Sarah. 2013. Words of the world: A global history of the Oxford English Dictionary. Cambridge University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139129046
Pinnavaia, Laura. 2001. The Italian borrowings in the Oxford English Dictionary: A lexicographical, linguistic and cultural analysis. Bulzoni.
Podhajecka, Mirosława. 2009. Loanwords in English and national stereotypes: A dictionary and corpus study. In Jan Zalewski (ed.), Language, cognition and society. A volume commemorating the 30th anniversary of the English Department in Opole. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Opolskiego. 105‒125.
Podhajecka, Mirosława. 2015. Remarks on the documentation in OED3: Cooking terms as a test case. Linguistica Silesiana 36. 167‒195.
Podhajecka, Mirosława. 2018. Russian loanwords in the Oxford English Dictionary revisited. Przegląd Rusycystyczny 2(162). 133‒158.
Podhajecka, Mirosława. 2021. Lexical borrowing in the light of digital resources: Nyet as a case study. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 56. 121–147. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/stap-2021-0019
Poplack, Shana. 2018. Borrowing: Loanwords in the speech community and in the grammar. Oxford University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190256388.003.0004
Purnell, Thomas, Joseph Salmons & Dilara Tepeli. 2005. German substrate effects in Wisconsin English: Evidence for final fortition. American Speech 80(2). 135‒164. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-80-2-135
Rodríguez Gonzáles, Félix (ed.). 1996. Spanish loanwords in the English language. A tendency towards hegemony reversal. Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110890617
Rosenberg, Daniel. 2017. An archive of words. In Lorraine Daston (ed.), Science in the archives: Pasts, presents, futures. University of Chicago Press. 271‒310. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226432533.003.0011
Schneidemesser, Luanne von. 2002. Settlement history in the United States as reflected in DARE: The example of German. American Speech 77(4). 398‒418. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-77-4-398
Schreier, Daniel & Marianne Hundt (eds.). 2013. English as a contact language. Cambridge University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511740060
Schultz, Julia. 2013. Twentieth-century borrowings from French to English: Their reception and development. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Schultz, Julia. 2016. Twentieth-century borrowings from German to English. Their semantic integration and contextual usage. Peter Lang. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-653-06847-4
Schultz, Julia. 2018. The influence of Spanish on the English language since 1801. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Seife, Rodolphe J. De 1994. The Shar'ia: An introduction to the law of the Islam. Austin & Winfield.
Serjeantson, Mary S. 1935. A history of foreign words in English. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Simpson, John. 2004. The OED and collaborative research into the history of English. Anglia 122(2). 185‒208. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/ANGL.2004.185
Simpson, John. 2014. What would Dr. Murray have made of the OED online today? Slovenščina 2.0: Empirical, Applied and Interdisciplinary Research 2(2). 15–36 DOI: https://doi.org/10.4312/slo2.0.2014.2.15-36
Simpson, John, Edmund Weiner & Philip Durkin. 2004. The Oxford English Dictionary today. Transactions of the Philological Society 102(3). 335‒381. DOI: 10.1111/j.0079-1636.2004.00140.x DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0079-1636.2004.00140.x
Slochower, Harry. 1970. Mythopoesis: Mythic patterns in the literary classics. Wayne State University Press.
Steinman, Louise. 2013. The souvenir: A daughter discovers her father’s war. North Atlantic Books.
Sylvester, Louise, Megan Tiddeman & Richard Ingham. 2020. An analysis of French borrowings at the hypernymic and hyponymic levels of Middle English. Lexis: Journal in English Lexicology 16. 1−32. DOI: 10.4000/lexis.3576 DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/lexis.4841
Tyrkkö, Jukka. 2020. The war years. Distant reading British parliamentary debates. In Joacim Hansson & Jonas Svensson (eds.), Doing digital humanities. Concepts, approaches, cases. Linnaeus University. 169‒197.
Wade, Terence. 1997. Russian words in English. Linguist 36(4). 102‒104.
Wright, Laura (ed.). 2020. The multilingual origins of standard English. De Gruyter Mouton. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110687545
Yaguello, Marina. 1998. Language through the looking glass: Exploring language and linguistics. (translated by Trevor Harris.) Oxford University Press.
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.