Etymological Component of Concepts “Summer” and “Autumn” and Its Influence on National and Cultural Specifics in Perception of Seasons in Slavic and German Linguistic Cultures

Abstract

The article presents an analysis of etymological component of the concepts summer and autumn in the Russian and English languages with the aim to identify the archaic core of these concepts and their comparison in Russian and English languages, the identification of similar and different components in their structure. Russian and English native speakers have similar concepts that can be grouped according to various criteria. Often similar concepts of different linguistic cultures are not completely the same in terms of their content and that proves their national identity. Such discrepancies can be significant for intercultural communication. The concepts summer and autumn are concepts with perceptual and sensory cores, therefore their multidimensional analysis is important and interesting from the point of view of identifying the general and national-caused elements of these concepts among representatives of the Slavic and Germanic language pictures. Such concepts are archetypal, ambivalent in their content and express the specifics of the world picture of the ethnos. In addition, historical-cultural approach taken in this study is the least developed area in the study of the concept. And etymology -is the source from which develops the conceptual content, reflection of the initial "naïve" ideas about the denotation, that are the "core" from which any concept in any language develops.