"putin(ov)shchina" exists.

[Alina Israeli]

>> -ism and -ist came into Russian in the early 20th century, I believe.
>>
>Surely both suffixes have been there longer. Even if you mean the addition of
>-ism and -ist to names of persons, there was dal'tonizm

That's rather optimistic. My French Petit Robert dates it for French as
1841. I would not expect it into Russian for another 30-40 years at the
very least. The whole notion has to be borrowed, not just the word.

>and darvinist in

Darwinisme entered French in 1874. Even though Darwin was quite a bit more
famous than Dalton, I would still add a couple of decades for the word
borrowing. How well the notion itself took root we know from the Monkey
Trial (1925).

>the mid-19th century.

My idea of "early 20th century" is not exactly mine, it came from some
article I read some 30 years ago.


>Kiparsky lumps Russian -izm nouns together with -izma nouns, all
>emanating from Greek -ismos, -isma nouns. Following Fogarasi, he gives
>the first occurrence of such a noun as "(i)matizm(a)" from 1144.
>However, it is not until the beginning of the 18th century that -izm
>(sometimes spelled -ism) nouns start to come into Russian in great
>numbers from West European languages, according to Kiparsky.

Considering that Zaliznjak or Obratnyj slovar' have exactly four pages of
words in -ism, I wonder what he means by "great numbers". A quick look at
the list eliminates a great many of the candidates, such as futurizm,
arabizm, ukrainizm, frejdizm, zoomorfizm... you get the picture: they
relate to events, discoveries or movements (or notions) of the 20th
century.

I would think that magnetizm could have come in the late 18th century
(French 1666 or 1775, depending on the meaning). But hardly any vocabulary
on this list strikes me as 19th century vocabulary. Maybe lunatizm, but
still would like to see some evidence.

Even the word dekabrizm must have entered much later. Incidentally, it was
not in Ushakov. Carizm was, but I doubt that it's an early "entrant",
certainly not before anti-czrist movement.

The fact that a few (certainly not great many) words entered early, does
not make -ism a suffix. I remember 1987 and the TV announcement of
Iran-Contragate and the exiliration with which I listened to it: a suffix
was born. Watergate is just a name of a hotel, and the "Watergate scandal"
had no "water" in it. And after Iran-Contragate the suffix started
prolifirating (nanny-gate, dacha-gate, Monica-gate etc.).

So I would like to see Kiparsky's data in support of his timing.

__________________________
 Alina Israeli
 LFS, American University
 4400 Mass. Ave., NW
 Washington, DC 20016

 phone:    (202) 885-2387
 fax:      (202) 885-1076 

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