Germanisms

words and expressions in Russian that were borrowed from German. Before the reign of Peter I the Great, such words as stul, “chair,” and shliapa, “hat” (16th century), and iarmarka, “fair,” and rotmistr, “cavalry captain” (17th century), had been adopted into Russian. In the first half of the 18th century there were numerous direct borrowings from German—administrative terms such as rang (rank), shtraf (fine), kantsler (chancellor), and bukhgalter (bookkeeper), and military terms such as iunker (Junker), lager’ (camp), and gauptvakhta (guardhouse), as well as terms for the arts and professions. In the second half of the 18th century, Russian assimilated various syntactical and word-formation caiques—for example, vygliadet’ from the German aussehen (to look or appear). In the mid-19th century there was an influx of political and philosophical terms, particularly in the form of caiques, such as mirovozzrenie (from Weltanschauung, “world view”) and samoopredelenie (from Selbstbestimmung, “self-determination”).