The Concept of Soul: A Comparative Study of the Russian and the Armenian Pictures of the World
- DOI
- 10.5922/2225-5346-2017-1-8
- Pages
- 84-91
Abstract
The author analyses the concept ‘soul’ as a means of representing reality in the brain through comparing two linguistic pictures of the world. It is known that a concept contains important cultural information, harbouring its concrete meaning in a linguistic unit. The study — a combination of cultural linguistic and comparative analysis of the concept — suggests that certain Russian idioms containing the concept ‘soul’ have equivalents in the Armenian language. However, in most Armenian equivalents, the ‘soul’ component is replaced by the ‘heart’ mythologeme. In the Armenian language, the concepts of ‘soul’ and ‘heart’ are relatively equal in the scope of information they encode. Moreover, there are words containing the ‘soul’ (հոգի) component that do not have equivalents in the Russian linguistic picture of the world. The analysis allows the author to take a glimpse into the inner world of a native speaker. In its turn, the worldview of an individual helps to trace the century-long development of a national linguistic picture of the world.
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