TRENDS IN THE ACQUISITION OF THE GEORGIAN VOCABULARY BY THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE (THE CASE OF THE RUSSIAN TRAVELLERS)

Our article is about an attampt to find ways for adaptation of foreign vocabulary by Russian language. As example, the paper discusses the travel essays of the Russian ambassador Fedot Yelchin (1639-1640) and the notes of Countess Uvarova published in Moscow in 1891. In the Russian language, words ending in a vowel (except for -а) today function as indeclinable nouns. In the analyzed records, nouns ending in a vowel (-о, -и, -е) are often combined with one or another turn, thus, they acquire a grammatical paradigm, eg: Риони – Рьян, Хуло – Хула, Ахалцихе – Ахалцых, Сатлели – Сатлель; Вахушти – Вахушт, Еристави - Еристов; азнаури –азнаур, додопали - додопал; лобио – лобия и т.д. The strong tendency of the assimilation of Georgian words by the Russian language is clearly felt in all texts created from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the twentieth century. From the observation of the text of Fedot Yelchin and P.S. Uvarova's travel notes, it is visible that there did not exist any norms of transferring foreign words into Russian language, until the 20th century. Often, fixators of Georgian vocabulary relied only on their hearing perception, linguistic intuition, which caused phonetic distortion of Georgian words. In the 30-s of the XX century, with the help of the governmental statements, the transference of Georgian toponimes to the Russian language was partly managed,the main principle became the maximal convergence of Russian pronunciation and writing with Georgian pronunciation. But it should be mentioned that it is still the confused aspect, which is not still decided in the Russian Language, because the selection of the Russian form for this or that Georgian word is often influenced by extralinguistic factors.