Russia Prehistory and Language
PREHISTORY
The oldest evidence in the territory of the Russia, dating back to the Upper Paleolithic, comes from a vast area of Siberia, the Urals and Eastern Europe (Kostenki on the Don; Puškari near Novgorod-Seversk; Malta near Irkutsk). During the Neolithic, numerous cultural traditions developed, such as the culture of Tripol´e, in western Ukraine, and the North Pontic one of Dnepr-Donec. This cultural development, and that of numerous other peoples, was interrupted or modified by the expansion of the so-called Kurgan culture(from kurgan “mound”, to indicate the typical burials), which also involved population shifts: it is a series of groups, known by various names, coming from the lower Volga basin and the steppes of Asia, which spread or they made their influence felt as far as Transcaucasia, southern Scandinavia, the Upper Rhine and Greece. They were more warlike populations than the previous ones, who had domesticated the horse: perhaps we owe the introduction of this animal in Europe. Starting from 2000 BC, new cultural groups began to form, referable to the Bronze Age: the culture of Andronovo, that of Fat’janovo, that of chamber tombs. The Iron Age, in turn, saw the development of numerous and differentiated cultures, the best known of which is that of the Scythians.: some groups of these warrior populations, who originally crossed the steppes of Asia on horseback, settled north of the Black Sea; they are the so-called royal Scythians, who gave rise to a particularly advanced culture, with artistic manifestations of great importance. The objects of Greek art found in the Scythian mounds testify to the contacts of the nomadic civilizations of the steppes with the Hellenic one
LANGUAGE
The Russian language is made up of a group of dialects which, with the Belarusian and Ukrainian dialects, form the eastern branch of the Slavic languages, within which it is characterized by the eras, gold and ele, ol results of the original links er, or and el, ol before consonant (see Russian bereg “shore”, opposite Bulgarian, Serbian and Croatian breg, Czech břeh, Polish brzeg, Paleoslavian brĕgŭ, from a * bergŭ), the outcome of the vowels ĭ and ŭ in e e o (Russian den ´ «day», moch«moss», from dĭnĭ e mŭchŭ, opposite the Serbian and Croatian den, machovina, Bulgarian den, măch, Czech den, mech , Polish dzień, mech). In morphology, noteworthy is the use of the plural genitive for the plural accusative in the names of animated beings. The Russian dialects are divided into two branches, northern and southern, distinguished by the fact that in the latter the protonic o does not assume the pronunciation a. ● The literary language is founded on Paleoslav, which gradually enriched itself with grammatical inflections and above all with Russian words: thus, while in the 11th century. the ‘ Gospels of Ostromir is written in Old Church Slavonic just coloring of Russian tracks, in the 13th and 14th century. the Russian element, especially in non-religious texts, is always increasing, until the beginning of the 18th century. formerly M. Lomonosov, the ‘father of Russian literature’, can speak two literary languages, Paleoslavian and Russian. Also in the eighteenth century the work of grammarians and writers unifies and strengthens the Russian literary language, which will then be elevated to a very high form of art by nineteenth-century literature. In the literary and even cultured Russian language, however, the traces of the Paleoslav origin have not completely disappeared: in many words we have re, ra, le, la in place of the popular Russian results ere, oro, ele, ol (grad, e.g. in Leningrad, instead of the Russian gorod «City»), šč and žd instead of the Russian results č and ž, from the original tj and dj (posešču «I will visit», from * posetja).
