Good seeds land on fertile soil: On the equivalence of vocabulary and phraseology

Abstract

The article is devoted to the problem of equivalence/inequivalence of words and phrases. This problem is still very acute for modern phraseological science and especially for phraseographic allotage practice. The original language for the analysis is modern German and the historical aspect of the German language. Four phraseological units are described both semantically and by the degree of their equivalence / nonequivalence in the Russian language. The first (German: Unkraut vergeht nicht — lit. ‘Weeds do not leave; weed grass does not die’) has practically no exact equivalents in the Russian language, the plot of the second (German: Wenn du aufisst, wird morgen [wieder] schönes Wetter — lit. ‘If you reach the end, tomorrow (again) will be nice weather’ — A call to the child to eat food on a plate to the end) continues the line of nonequivalent German phraseology, in other languages it is impossible to find phrases with the same figurative basis. The third unit (German: zu etwas kommen wiе die Jungfrau zum Kind — lit. ‘Get something like a virgin a child’) reflects the biblical story, which in this form does not exist in Russian, and in other languages we also do not see a similar motif of the image of a virgin in the above sense. The last (auf fruchtbaren Boden fallen — lit. ‘to fall on fertile soil’) is devoted to the biblical expression, which is fully equivalent in German and Russian. Due to the biblical origin of the expression, it is known in many languages.

Keywords:

phraseology, paremiology, German-Russian equivalent, folk speech