No 10 FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE 222 Elena Berezovich Russian Food as Refl ected in Foreign Languages (Derivatives from the Words ‘Russia’ and ‘Russian’)1 What can language tell us about what dishes and foodstuffs are produced or commonly consumed in Russia, favourites of the Russian people, and deserving of the name ‘Russian food’? A whole range of facts may be analysed in an attempt to answer this question: names that contain a semantic element indicating that such-and- such a dish is typical of Russian cuisine; the results of psycho-linguistic experiments (reactions to the stimulus of ‘Russian food’, etc.); opinions expressed by representatives of different cultural and linguistic traditions on what dishes they consider to be Russian; names or recipes in cookery books, or sections within them devoted to Russian cuisine, and so on. It would require several monographs to do justice to this vast range of data. Our present remarks will confine themselves to a small part of it (but, one may imagine, its core material). If we are to Elena Berezovich consider systemic linguistic information (as Urals Federal University, being the most stable, having undergone the Ekaterinburg, Russia natural selection of usage), we should, therefore,
[email protected] turn in the first place to those linguistic units 1 The author expresses heartfelt thanks to colleagues who have supplied various linguistic data: T. A. Agapkina (Moscow), N. B. Vakhtin (St Petersburg), A. Loma (Belgrade), G. I. Kabakova (Paris), A. Kaufman (Vancouver), V. S. Kuchko (Yekaterinburg), O. V. Merkulova (Zaporizhzhya), S. S. Mikhalishcheva (Yekaterinburg), D. V. Spiridonov (Yekaterinburg), A.