WORDS OF CHINESE ORIGIN IN THE CONCEPT OF "TEA"
The article is devoted to the issues of lexical borrowing, which have become especially relevant at the present time. Borrowing is viewed as a process by which elements of another language, foreign to the native language, are not regulated by the knowledge of the language from which they are drawn. The author of the study used a descriptive method involving interpretation and classification of the material. The author studied the borrowings from the Chinese language related to the concept of tea, as well as the peculiarities of meaning and use of these sinicisms, analyzed their word-building potential and the formation of phraseological units based on the keywords verbalizing the concept. The words borrowed from the Chinese language and included in the tea concept have different degree of assimilation in the Russian language system. It is often difficult to determine at what stage a particular borrowing is in the process of adaptation. The author of the study revealed two main stages of adaptation of borrowings in the Russian language. The first is partial acquisition of graphic, phonetic, semantic, and grammatical features (borrowing). The second is rooting in the language. The Russian language assimilates the word “tea” in the highest degree. The lowest degree of assimilation has the word “oolong”. The National Corps of the Russian language shows that such borrowings from Chinese as “baihovy”, “oolong”, or “puer” are relatively new to the Russian language. It is directly related to the low degree of their assimilation. Thus, the borrowed units adapt to varying degrees on all language levels by modification in accordance with the rules of the recipient language.