PRELEST’: THE HISTORY OF THE WORD

Unforgettable Nina Davidovna — for the 100th anniversary
The puzzle of the Russian word prelest’ is widely recognized in linguistic studies, pointing at the fact that it combines two seemingly opposite meanings: both ‘temptation, enticement’ and ‘beauty, charm’. When discussing this peculiar polysemy (sometimes even treated as a kind of enantiosemy, which, in our opinion, is not entirely justifi ed), linguists have mainly drawn attention to the coexistence of the two meanings in diff erent spheres — “sacred” and “secular”; however, the exact conditions of this semantic change remained in the shade. The present paper provides the results of a corpus study (using advanced functionalities of panchronic search, currently available within Russian National Corpus) and highlights some additional aspects of the semantic history of this word. Of primary importance is here the infl uence of French, which contributed to the emergence of the “secular” meaning of prelest’ / prelesti as a semantic calque from French charme(s). Of interest is also the emergence and further development of a direct French borrowing — the word šarm, which is still actively used in modern Russian.
The article bears a dedication to the memory of Nina Davidovna Arutyunova, who was particularly fond of this word — as well as the complexity of natural language.