À travers le TLFi : les emprunts au russe

Words borrowed fromRussian into French are bound up in a relationship situated in some point in time between French speakers and the Russian language. The article gives a chronological inventory of Russian loanwords, classified by their first appearance as testified by the Trésor de la langue française, featuring accounts of travellers and geographers. Then 19^th century Russian literature appears as the principle purveyors of lexical transfers, such as the ethnonyms tchérémisse, tcherkesse, or name of realia such as kakochnik, nagaïka.…A similar inventory drawn up from the Petit Robert shows the role of the press in the 20th century, with the transfer of specific names used in the Soviet system, such as goulag, nomenklatura, then glasnost, perestroika. The French speaker seems to keep these Russian loanwords at arm’s length, as if the Russian universe of reference remains somehow irreversibly foreign.