LINGUOCULTURAL FEATURES OF SUBSTITUTIONS OF MONETARY LEXICAL UNITS IN THE BIBLE AND QUR’AN

Abstract

The study of monetary vocabulary in the linguocultural aspect in diachrony is associated with a problem of interaction between language and culture. Money is one of the factors that allows a nation to be economically independent and achieve material well-being. The question of the emergence of monetary units, their use in a particular state in certain historical periods of time allows to get an idea of the values of a particular society. The lexical units functioning in the Bible and the Qur’an contains cultural and historical information not only about the life of Christians and Muslims in general, but also information about their monetary system in particular, and forms the Christian and Muslim worldview. The objective of the research is to identify linguocultural features of the substitution of monetary vocabulary in the texts of the Bible and the Qur’an. The researchers consider words and phrases denoting the names of coins, monetary units and their amounts, which are used in the texts of the English-language canonical versions of the Bible and the Qur’an of the XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries (King James Version and George Sale’s translation, respectively); their lexical meanings and notions are described and compared with monetary vocabulary used in the texts of the late (modern) English Bible and Qur’an of the XXIst century (Today’s New International Version and translation by Abdullah Yusuf Ali); the ways and mechanisms of substitution of these linguistic units are identified and explained; the lingual and extralingual factors that influenced on such replacements are given. The proposed description is based on the methods of definitional, contextual, comparative and descriptive analysis. The authors have identified that language units representing the Roman, American and British monetary systems are used in the texts of the modern Bible. The names of the Arabic monetary units of the VIIth century are retained in the texts of the modern Qur’an. Vocabulary substitution is influenced by both lingual factors, such as the development, modernization and expansion of the English language, and extralingual factors, such as the development of the national economy and inflation.