Proverbs of Biblical origin: from a single source to linguistic diversity

The study analyzes Russian proverbs of biblical origin in their diverse semantic and structural connections with their original source. The relevance of the research is determined by the insufficient attention to the Bible heritage as a dynamically developing part of the general language system, including the paremiological system. The aim of the study is to identify and differentiate in the modern Russian literary language the structural and semantic dynamics of paremiological units that originate from biblical texts. The materials for the study were dictionaries of biblical phraseological units, paremiological dictionaries, as well as Russian National Corpus (subcorpora: main, newspaper, poetic, Russian classics). The methods of structural-semantic modeling, contextual analysis, historical-etymological analysis, linguisticcultural analysis were used. The author examined the functioning of the following groups of phraseological units: 1) paremiological identities; 2) proverbs which have undergone semantic transformation in comparison with their source; 3) proverbs which have undergone structuralsemantic transformation in comparison with their source; 4) folk proverbs based on biblical wisdom; 5) proverbs that have lost their connection with their biblical source and have been reinterpreted; 6) individual-author transformations of proverbs of biblical origin. The study shows the degree of such changes. Basic are paremiological identities, i.e. accurately reproduced maxims of the Holy Scripture. The next stage of linguistic adaptation of biblical proverbs is their structural-semantic transformation in comparison with their source, which does not violate neither the original sacred meaning of biblical expressions, nor their generalized linguistic coloring. The further stage of assimilation results in Russian folk proverbs based on biblical wisdom and symbolism. Some biblical proverbs due to different reasons (especially ideological) can lose their connection with the source and be reinterpreted at different levels, sometimes cardinal ideological reinterpretation. The final stage of linguistic adaptation of biblical proverbs is creative individual-author transformations, which become “national property” and the object of “untranslatable in translation”.