Abstract
The Bible played an important role in the formation of literary languages of all Christian people. It is the ever-living source of not only plots and symbols, but also catchphrases, which are needed to be analyzed to restore the hierarchy of values of ancient communities, and to create a language portrait of the modern nations. Biblical catchphrases left a noticeable imprint in the history of the Russian language, too. Since the moment of Christianity adoption on Old Russia and writing advent, the biblical postulates were fi xed in consciousness of the people, and had an impact on the national mentality formation. The use of phraseological units in the publicistic discourse is an indicator of their demand. In this article, we study biblical phrases with components Babylon and Egypt, and reveal the ones, functioning in modern language or have passed into passive vocabulary. The choice of the units is not random: modern political struggle in the Middle East is rooted in the history of antiquity, noted in the Old Testament. The authors concluded that the actualization of different bible phrases depends on social events. In the Russian language, in demand are still units, describing various human evils, connected with the history of Babylon (The Tower of Babel, Lady of Babylon, the confusion of Babylon, the Confusion of tongues, and etc.), and bitter trials, associated with the ten plagues of Egypt (the plagues of Egypt, Egyptian darkness). The other biblical catchphrases, connected with these toponyms, have passed into the passive vocabulary and now can be met in fi ne or epistolary literature of the 18th – the beginning of the 20th century.
Keywords
Linguistics, Biblical catchphrase, The Tower of Babel, the confusion of Babylon, the plagues of Egypt, Egyptian darkness, modern publicistic discourse
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