On the adaptation of English loanwords in Russian in the 19th century (on the basis of newspaper materials)

In the present paper, the author analyses three new words of foreign origin (вагон, рельс, and туннель) borrowed into the Russian language from English in the 1830s at the beginning of railway development in Russia. In the study, these loanwords are described in various aspects: the author discusses the problems of their lexicographic presentation (difficulties in determining the source language and the intermediary language, the time of the first inclusion of these words in a dictionary), and indicates the earliest and further instances of their usage in the language of Russian journalism (first of all, based on materials taken from the newspaper Severnaya pchela). special attention is paid to the problems of formal and semantic adaptation of English loanwords in issue, a detailed investigation of their orthographic variants is offered, and tendencies in the development of the spelling and the meaning of these lexical innovations in the Russian language in the 1830s and 1840s are demonstrated. On the basis of diverse quotations taken from the written periodical press of that time, the semantic peculiarities of the analysed English loanwords and the corresponding Russian terms are compared. In the concluding paragraph of the paper, the author reveals several common features in the orthographic and morphological adaptation of new loanwords in the Russian language in the 19^th and the 21^st centuries.