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— ФИЛОСОФСКИЕ НАУКИ —
УДК 1/14
D. S. Borisova
The Main Characteristics of Ecology of Language
Abstract. Unfortunately nowadays conditions of our lives according to the latest natural phenomena are quite poor. Human consumption, the popularity of technological activities, over-population - all of it has a negative impact in our environment. The only way of this situation is to change the human's consciousness, his attitude to the place were he lives, because human is the only one who is responsible for well-being of our planet and its inhabitants. Our work considers the ecology in philosophical context, because the problems of interaction of human and nature is traditional for philosophyand a big emphasis was placed on new development of ecology - language ecology, that studies interactions between languages with their environment, with the purpose of preserving uniqueness of each language. Language exists only in human minds and it can function only by human. Therefore it is in the people's interest to treat it carefully and try to preserve the distinctiveness of each language. Current form of art mass- and social-media, that highly experiments with expletives and borrowings can not be good example for youth and undoubtedly have bad influence in our speech and literacy. As part of our work we designed tests for investigation the language ecology of young people living in the territory of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). Items of the first test concerned their attitude to the current and future conditions of Russian language and characteristics of their daily speech. The second one investigated the level of literacy of students, their knowledge of the basic rules of grammar and some idiomatic expressions.
Keywords: ecology, philosophy, human, language, ecological problems, ecology of language, ecolinguistics.
Д. С. Борисова
Основные характеристики экологии языка
Аннотация. К сожалению в наше время условия нашей жизни, ввиду последних природных явлений, катастроф, в плачевном состоянии. Потребительское отношение к природе и ресурсам, популярность техногенной деятельности, резкое увеличение численности населения - все это негативно сказывается на нашу окружающую среду. Единственный выход из этой ситуации лежит в изменении человеческого сознания и его отношения к месту проживания, потому что именно человек является ответственным за планету.
В нашей работе мы рассмотрели экологию в философском контексте, т.к. проблемы взаимодействия человека и природы являются традиционными для философии, а также особое внимание было уделено на новое направление экологии - экологии языка, которая изучает взаимодействие языка с окружающи-
BORISOVA Diana Semenovna - Master's student of the Department of Interpretation and Translation, Institute of Foreign Philology and Regional Studies., M.K. Ammosov North-Eastern Federal University.
E-mail: dianashi8@mail.ru
БОРИСОВА Диана Семёновна - магистрантка кафедры перевода, ИЗФиР Северо-Восточный федеральный университет им. М.К. Аммосова.
Научный руководитель
KOZHEVNIKOVNikolay Nikolaevich - Doctor of Philosophical Sciences, Professor, Department of Philosophy, M.K. Ammosov North-Eastern Federal University.
E-mail: nnkozhev@mail.ru
КОЖЕВНИКОВ Николай Николаевич - доктор философских наук, профессор каф. философии, Северо-Восточный федеральный университет им. М.К. Аммосова
ми факторами, с целью сохранения уникальности каждого языка. Язык существует в рамках сознания человека и функционирует только с его помощью. Таким образом бережное отношение и следовательно сохранение самобытности каждого языка исключительно в интересах самого человека. Современная форма СМИ, социальных сетей и искусства, которая позволяет использование ненормативной лексики и взаимствований не может служить достойным примером для молодежи и, несомненно, негативно влияет на нашу речь и грамотность.
В рамках нашей работы мы провели тест, целью которой являлось исследование экологии языка молодежи, проживающих на территории Республики Саха (Якутия). Первый тест был направлен на выявление отношения молодежи к нынешнему и будущему положению русского языка, а также особенностей их повседневной речи. Второй тест выявил уровень грамотности студентов, их знание базовых правил грамматики и некоторых устойчивых выражений.
Ключевые слова: экология, философия, человек, язык, экологические проблемы, экология языка, эко-лингвистика.
Philosophy of ecological problems
The problems of interaction of human, society and nature is traditional for philosophy. Philosophy always reflected problems of the existence of human and nature, having the goal of making the particular harmony of their interaction on the base of human spiritual comprehension of himself and world of the nature and, accordingly, spiritual activity, designed to conversion of nature.
Philosophy achieved a lot in the comprehension and clarification of ecological problems, that exist nowadays;
• philosophers give generalized attitudinal interpretation of ecological problems;
• in philosophy occurred active process of development of conceptually-categorical apparatus on issues of human interaction, society and nature, ecology and formation of ecological forms of social consciousness;
• along with the science and other kinds of spiritual activities philosophy implements the process of searching more effective ways of solution of modern ecological problems [3].
Moreover, philosophy takes part in the formation of ecohumanism. Dissemination of ecohuman-ism plays a big role for formation of the human and society treatment to the nature and, therefore, approaches of the resolution of ecological problems. Ecohumanism is considered with the wider good and human flourishing and, in common with progressive environmental groups and green activists, advocates radical solutions, for preventing climate chaos that also critique the growth-obsessed, con-sumerist ideologies of governments that sometimes impact negatively on the planet. Human rights, equality, environmental justice and the need for social change are values which ecohumanists embrace [6].
It has been generally recognized that the ecological problems had been adequately identified in antiquity and that the leading ancient philosophers had studied it in considerable detail. In fact the Greek thinkers had founded the first principles of ecology on a scientific base. The contributions of Plato, Aristotle and Theophrastus take on a special significance in view of their understanding of the problem of ecology as due to the breakdown of the harmonious interconnections between plants, animals and human beings, the environment in general. They saw correctly what catastrophic consequences follow when human greediness gets out of bounds. Even so, they could not have foreseen the extremes it has reached in our own times [2].
Several papers are noteworthy, because they provide direct and sufficiently significant influence not only to human's consciousness, but their practical and ecological activity:
• researches of V.I. Vernadsky and his followers about the noosphere, where presented the way of achievement a harmony between human, society and nature and in this base - resolution of ecological problems. In this study the main factor, that harmonizes the relation between society and nature, is reasonable activity of the social human, that can create stability and reasonable forms of existence and development to the natural environment of his living [10]
• concepts of N.N. Moiseev about ecological imperative, coevolution of nature and society, that reflected modern condition of ecological situation in the world and approaches to its stabilization and improvement [8].
• the concept of sustainable ecological development, that was made and offered to the global community by number of institutions, established by UN on issues facing ecology and included to some regulatory documents, adopted at international, regional and national levels has an important significance. This concept was adopted as guide to the action on the UN conference on environmental issues in Rio-de-Janeiro in 1992 [11].
The word 'ecology' is formed from Greek words oikos (house) and logos (study) and it gave an opportunity to D.S. Likhachev to establish a work about ecology of culture, L. Skvortsov about ecology of the word, F. Danesh and S. Chmeirkova about ecology of language of small nationalities. And, as a linguist I would like to deeply consider ecolinguistics and ecology of language.
Ecological linguistics
The awareness of the ecolinguistics phenomenon, according to A.A. Polukhin, is impossible without considering modern philosophical views on existing ecological problems. In his opinion, development of philosophical view provides the key to understanding ecolinguistics in the chain of greening and environmentalization of scientific consciousness on the road to systemic turn to the science in formation of new philosophical systems and paradigms [9].
Ecolingustics, or ecological linguistics, is a new branch of linguistics which investigates the role of language in the development and possible solution of ecological and environmental problems. It emerged in the 1990s as a new frame of study of linguistic research, widening sociolinguistics to take into account not only the social context in which language is embedded, but also the ecological context. It was Einar Haugen, who combined language with ecology. For Haugen 'the ecology of language' meant the study of the interrelations between languages in the human mind and in the multilingual community [5].
Ecolinguistics also includes language diversity, because of the relationship between diversity of local languages and biodiversity. The forces of globalization and linguistic imperialism allow the main language to spread, and replace local languages. This leads to a loss of local culture and the important ecological knowledge contained within their languages. One of the goals of ecolinguistic is to protect both cultural diversity and the linguistic diversity that supports it [1].
The term of 'ecology of language' can be determined as a science about relationships between language and its environment, where the environment is a society that uses language as one of their codes [7]. Language exists only in the consciousness of people who speak it and operates only in relationships with other speakers and their social and natural environment. Partially ecology of language has psychological nature (i.e. relationship with other languages in the consciousness of speaker), partially social (i.e. relationship with society, in which language is used as means of communication) [4].
Alwin Fill was the first, who formulated precise terminology for different areas of ecolinguistics. In whole, he highlighted three areas:
• ecolinguistics - common term that unites ecology and linguistics;
• ecology of language that deals with interaction between languages in order to preserve lingual diversity;
• ecological linguistics that imposes terms of ecology on language [4]
We can not deny the fact that nowadays our language and erudition are undergoing hard times. It is connected with the boom of internet communication, the language of modern mass-media. We can classify the negative factors that plays a bad role for ecology of our language, they are:
• impoverishment of the lexicon and idioms, especially among young people;
• swearing, that nowadays even is used in literature and in the theatre;
• substitution of words by foreign borrowings;
• jargonization of speech that destroys stylistic norm;
• illiteracy (lexical, grammatical, stylistic) [3].
Investigation of ecology of language of youth in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia)
According to these factors we designed an experimental test to investigate the literacy and ecology of language of youth, living in the territory of the Republic Sakha (Yakutia).
The participants were 54,8% and 45,2% women whose age ranged from 17 to 24. The ethnic diversity: 83,9% described themselves as Yakut, 6,5% as Russian, and 9,7 as Evenk. The majority of participants was born (48,4%) in Yakutsk. More than half of the participants (61,3%) had completed general secondary education, whereas about 22,6% have basic general education and 16,1% had completed high education.
Ecology of language of modern youth test was measured using the total score for the 10-item scale, with items, to which respondents reply "yes" or "no" had sixteen questions about their attitude to jargons, swear words, illiteracy in online-messages and filler words. Literacy was investigated by small test that included multiple-choice questions, that had twenty questions concerning basic lexical and punctuation rules and five questions, where they had to give their own description of some terms and popular idioms.
Table 1
Percentage of participants endorsing (no, medium, yes) ecology of language items
Item Most common answer Other answers
My attitude to swear words, using in modern literature, music and theatre. 31% - good (4) 27,6% - 3, 17,2% - 2 13,8% - 1, 10,3% - 5.
It is difficult to express my thoughts, without using filler words. 34,5% - yes (4) 34,5% - no (2) 13,8% - 1; 10,3% - 5; 6,9% - 2.
I do not pay attention to correctness of spelling of (my) words in messages or online-communication. 34,5% - no (1) 34,5% - no (2) 13,8% - 3; 13,8% - 4; 3,4% - 5.
I intentionally make mistakes in texting messages. 29,6% - yes (5) 25,6% - 1; 20,7% - 4; 13,8% - 2; 10,3% - 3.
I use swear words in my daily speech. 37,9% - yes (4) 31% - 2; 20,7% - 5; 6,9% - 3; 3,4% - 1.
My attitude to swear words. 34,5% - neutral (3) 31% - 4; 17,2% - 2; 13,8% - 1; 3,4% - 5.
I do not pay much attention to punctuation in messages or online-communication. 34,5% - no (1) 24,1% - 2; 20,7% - 4; 10,3% - 3, 5.
I often use jargons in my speech. 55,2% - yes (4) 17,2% - 3; 10,3% - 2, 5; 6,9% - 1.
My attitude to jargons. 44,2% - neutral (3) 24,1% - 4; 10,3% - 1, 2, 5.
It is easy to communicate, using swear words and jargons. 37,9% - medium (3) 31% - 4; 17,2% - 1; 10,3% - 5 3,4% - 2.
I do not like when people make mistakes in orthography and punctuation and etc. 34,5% - yes (4) 31% - 5; 24,1% - 3; 6,9% - 2; 3,4% - 1.
I correct people, when they make mistakes in daily and online-communication. 27,6% - medium 24,1% - 4; 20,7% - 1, 2; 6,9% - 5.
I read literature. 27,6% - rarely (2) 24,1% - 1; 20,7% - 3. 17,2% - 5; 10,3% - 4.
In my opinion "polluted" language plays a bad role in development of society. 41,7% - yes (5) 29,2% - 4; 20,8% - 3; 8,3% - 2.
The first test showed us, that, primarily, the ecology of language of young people experiences use of jargons, swear and filler words. Use of internet-communication made them forget about correctness of texting words and punctuation. Moreover, it made them to create some online-jargons and use borrowings. It is pity to see that majority of youth is not paying much attention on reading literature (only less of a half). But in spite of these facts it is well aware that their attitude to language «pollution» is negative, youth realizes that «polluted» language plays a bad role in development of our society.
Literacy test showed us that primarily participants have weak point at formation of plural forms of complex word-combinations (adjective+noun, numeral+noun), norms of word usage and syntactic norms. Moreover participants had some problems in giving description for idioms. Problems that occurred in the second test are connected with lack of reading. Unfortunately, as we saw, the majority of modern young people do not pay much attention to reading, which is the basic component of self-education and mental development.
Conclusion
Ecology is more than just science about environment, ecology is also our mental health, culture, clear consciousness, language and, certainly, our attitude to our world. We should not forget that, environment and human are an integral whole - one is not possible without another.
The human attitude to ecology is one of the main philosophical issues, that deals with human- and nature existence, their harmonic relationships, and spiritual activity. But in spite of many philosophical papers this issue is still open.
As it was mentioned above, ecology includes many aspects. As a linguist I made emphasize in linguistic area in my work describing terms like "ecology of language" and "ecolinguistics" and also running an experimental test for youth of our university on their ecology of language
The ecology of language of our youth is weak, in this case we may say that it is, first of all, connected with internet usage, influence of external factors and lack of reading. These factors weaken our literacy and complicate expression of our thoughts, making us use filler words and jargons.
The main result of this paper, based on research presented in Table 1, comes down to approval that it is difficult to achieve purification of modern language from harmful introductions by ideological and social actions, especially by restriction. Priority is an inner culture, sense of linguistic purity, its beauty, optimal and proportionality that can be achieved by philosophical studies on this area.
Our language exists in our minds and it functions when we share it with one another. We do not have to destroy or somehow damage it, including some bad words in our daily speech or having careless attitude to our literacy. It goes without saying that jargons, filler and swear words, used in literature, art, music, theatre and even in fashion can not have good influence in development of our society, we do not have to let it to be normal.
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