The vocabulary of the Russian language was formed over many centuries, and at different times and for different reasons, words borrowed from other languages penetrated it, others, replacing the original Russian word that already existed, others, coming with a previously unknown Russian thing, like a name, others, arising to denote some new concept. Many borrowed words have become so firmly embedded in the Russian language that their foreign language quality has completely ceased to be felt, such as notebook (from Greek), room (from Latin), pocket, money (from Turkic), ticket, soup (from French), plate (from German), umbrella (from Dutch) and many others.

A special place among loanwords is occupied by words that came to Russian from the Church Slavonic language. Church Slavonic is not the language of any Slavic people. This term refers to the language of extant Slavic written monuments of the X-XI centuries, which continued the tradition of liturgical and canonical books translated from Greek by the first teachers of the Slavs Cyril (Constantine the Philosopher) and his brother Methodius in the IX century. The Church Slavonic language is based on the dialect of the southern Slavs, who lived in the area of the city of Solun or, in Greek, Thessaloniki, which was the birthplace of Constantine and Methodius. However, the Church Slavonic language itself became the first common Slavic literary language, just as the alphabet created by Cyril became the first common Slavic alphabet.

The significance of the first literary language of the Slavs for their further history is enormous. According to the well-known researcher of the Cyril and Methodius literary heritage E. M. Vereshchagin, " the newly created literary language became a means of introducing Slavs not only to the values of Christianity, but also to all the accumulated information in the world.

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it and the transformed ancient culture. In fact, along with the adoption of Christianity, the Slavs became familiar with the basics and systems of law, philosophy, aesthetics (including fine and singing arts), medicine, urban planning and finance, as well as natural sciences and technology (mathematics, geography, biology, metal mining and processing, etc.) - and all of them have a unique meaning. pre-Christian origin" (Vereshchagin E. M. The history of the emergence of the ancient common Slavic literary language. Translation activities of Cyril and Methodius and their students. Moscow, 1997).

In order to translate the main liturgical and canonical books into the new Slavic literary language, the first teachers Cyril and Methodius and their followers had to develop and implement a complex translation technique that made it possible to create Slavic scientific terminology in various fields of knowledge in the shortest possible time. One of the examples of philosophical terms created, perhaps, in the time of Cyril and Methodius or a little later, can serve as the word quality, which is hardly perceived by anyone but specialists today as a borrowing.

In the Church Slavonic language, the word quality (kachstvo) was formed from the pronoun kak (short form of the pronoun what) using the suffix-bstvo. The consonant k before b changed to h, and the vowel b after the fall of the reduced ones-to E. In fact, this word is a tracing paper from the Greek name of the category of quality, which Aristotle denoted by the interrogative pronoun what.

The word kachstvo, which entered the Old Russian language no later than the XI century, is already found in Svyatoslav's Izbornik of 1073: "Kachstvo is an essential force, rekshe o rodeh ubo ustavnaya rozlichya, rekshe slovesnoe, ymrtnoe, besmrtye i prokaya" (Dictionary of the Russian language of the XI-XVII centuries, Moscow, 1980. Issue 7; further - SLRYA XI-XVII centuries. Vol.). Being an abstract book Slavism, this word belonged to the number of "inconvenient recognizable speeches" and required a special interpretation (Vinogradov V. V. Russian language. 2nd Moscow, 1972). Here is how it is interpreted in one of the dictionaries of the XVII century called "The Book of glagolemaya Greek alphabet": "Kachstvo, nature what is it like: if you speak, you see a person, and what is ti what is a person: white, black, and paki whether young or old, that is, kachstvo, hedgehog what is it" (SLRYA XI-XVII centuries. Issue 7).

Similarly, this word is interpreted in the alphabet books of the XVI-XVII centuries, for example: "If you speak: the form of a person, I ask you about his quality, rekshe about the quality of the face and image, which is black or white, old or young. Sitse quality is also glagoljetsja and at dreveh, birds, zvereh, kamneh, pitiy and yastviy and other veshcheh. The nature of the imut is different " (Sakharov I. Tales of the Russian People, St. Petersburg, 1849).

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For the interpretation of the word quality, as we can see, two words are used: nature and kak'ovstvo.

Nature is an Old Slavonic tracing paper from the Greek name of another Aristotelian category: ousiav (from the verb to be, to exist ) - "usia" or "essence", "substance". Kakovstvo is like a secondary tracing paper. After the internal form of the word quality, due to various phonetic changes, became opaque, its connection with the pronoun what was obscured, there was a need for tracing paper from tracing paper: Russian kakovstvo is equal to Old Slavonic kachstvo, and both of them, in fact, mean "kakoystvo", or, if we introduce this quasi-word in a number of more modern terms, "kakoynost".

It is interesting to note that the Ukrainian language, which is related to Russian, has gone on to "enlighten" the inner form of the word quality, so to speak, to the end. Quality in Ukrainian is denoted by the noun yakist, derived from the pronoun yakiy, which has the meaning "what", "what is". The Ukrainian word yak1st is equivalent to the Russian word kakovstvo. I must say that in some ancient Russian monuments there is a translation of the Latin word qualitas ("quality") with the word yakost. However, in Russian, this word, which clearly appeared under the influence of the Polish language, did not take root, since it did not correspond, as in Ukrainian, with the corresponding pronoun.

In Aristotle, the category " ousia "("essence") is also called the question " What is it?", or " What is it? "(in Latin"Quid sit?"). This designation of "essence" was translated into Latin as quidditas, which in the Russian philosophical tradition corresponds to the term what is (from the question " What is?"). How, then, in the interpretation of the word quality in the Old Russian alphabet books, did two such incompatible concepts as nature, that is, "usia", "essence", "substance", or "chtoynost", and kakovstvo, that is, "kakoynost" collide ? To the questions "What is it?" and "What is it?" they respond with completely different words.

However, there is no" qui pro quo " in the interpretation of the ABCs. Behind the revealed contradictions lies a whole epoch in the development of European philosophy. Let us confine ourselves to a brief recapitulation of all the intricacies of this fascinating drama of thought.

From Aristotle there are two lines in the doctrine of essence. The first one is reflected in Aristotle's work "Categories". Here, the author divides entities into first, or primary, and second, or secondary. The first ones are individuals, individual beings or objects, for example: an individual person, an individual horse. The latter are species and genera, for example: a person in general, a living being. The second entities are consistently included in the highest genus-the "Entity" category. According to Aristotle, both the first and second entities actually exist, but to varying degrees. Hence the idea of gradation, or ie-

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the monarchies of being. A synonym for the term "usia" - "essence", understood as an individual, is also the word hypostasis, which in Orthodoxy is fixed in the meaning of "one of the persons of the Holy Spirit". Trinity".

The second line in the doctrine of essence is outlined in Aristotle's Metaphysics, where we find the following summary: "So, it turns out that essence is spoken of in two [basic] meanings: in the sense of the last substratum, which is no longer reflected in anything else, and in the sense that, being defined, something can to be separated [from matter only in thought], and such is the image or form of every thing" (cit. by: Stepanov Yu. S. Yazyk i metod [Language and Method], Moscow, 1998). The term second entities is not used in Metaphysics, and this has important implications that are directly relevant to our topic. Therefore, I will allow myself to quote extensively from the aforementioned work of Yu. S. Stepanov: "The entire hierarchy of the category of Essence as a single category ceases to exist and all tiers of inclusions become something like the qualities of the first entities. Indeed, with the development of this point of view, the category of Quality is becoming more and more developed. It consumes all the upper tiers of the Entity hierarchy (i.e., all but the first entities) and all other categories except Relation (Related). In the "Metaphysics" for the most part, this view is carried out, but as if in its initial form - we are talking about three main categories: Essence, Property, Relation (Correlated). In such logical-linguistic systems of the XX century as the system of R. Carnap, the hypertrophy of the concept of "property" (and this is a modification of the category Quality) reaches its limit: "class" is identified with "property"" (Edict op.).

Two lines in the understanding of essence gave rise to two major trends in philosophy-conceptualism, or realism (the first line), and nominalism (the second line). Adherents of realism, as we know, argued that general concepts (universals) have a real existence and precede the existence of individual things. The most prominent realist was Anselm of Canterbury. Thomas Aquinas also joined this trend. Nominalists, on the other hand, believed that only individual things with their individual qualities really exist. The general concepts created by our thinking do not exist independently of things. The nominalists were Duns Scott and Okam. In modern times, the ideas of nominalism were developed in the teachings of Berkeley and Hume.

In medieval philosophy, two understandings of essence were fixed behind two terms, as the well-known researcher of the history of philosophical terminology A. I. Yurchenko writes: "Essence as being in itself (thing, object) mainly began to be called substantia, and essence as the essence of things, as common in things-essentia" (Yurchenko A. I. Izbornik 1073: interpretation of the main ancient Russian texts-

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Voprosy yazykoznaniya [Questions of Linguistics]. 1988. N 2). In the philosophical chapters of Izbornik Svyatoslav of 1073, both understandings of essence are reflected - both as substance and as essence. It also gives an interpretation of the term nature, which "external", that is, non-Christian, philosophers understood as an entity "refined to the level of an inferior species" (Ibid.). However, at the same time, it is noted that the holy fathers used both terms-essence and nature - as synonyms, since "and (the word) "essence" is formed from (the verb) "to exist", and (the word) "nature" - from (the verb) "is". But (the words) "exist" and" is "mean the same thing, for both speak of being, existence" (Izbornik 1073, translated by A. I. Yurchenko. Consequently, the term nature could also be interpreted in two senses - both as essence-substance, and as essence-essence.

Such an understanding of essence as the essence of a thing, its "essence", that is, its essential properties, brings this category closer to the category of quality. This is reflected in the interpretation of the concept of "quality" in the Izbornik of 1073: "quality is an essential force", that is, the essence-the essence of a thing. In the same sense, the concept of "quality" is interpreted through the concept of "nature" in Russian alphabet books: "kachstvo, nature what is what you like". However, the term quality refers not only to the essential properties of a thing - substance, but also to its accidental properties, i.e. accidents. And this second understanding of the term quality is also reflected in the definition of the Izbornik of 1073: quality as "food in disguise". The same kind of random properties of things-substances are brought under the definition of quality in the ABC books, since the various "whats" of a person given here in the interpretation of this concept, namely, black or white, old or young, clearly cannot be included in the series of his essential, essential properties in the sense in which they are "the two natures of Christ are divinity and humanity." However, the authors of the abcs ' interpretations clearly did not realize this subtle philosophical difference between the quality-nature-essence and the quality-kak'ovstvo-accident: for them, the interpretation "kach'stvo, natura kak'ovo chto lyubo" is equivalent to the interpretation "kach'stvo, hedgehog is kak'stvo".

I must say that the word nature in the Old Russian language was also used in the philosophical sense "vaguely", ambiguously, covering with its meaning, on the one hand, individual entities-things (living beings, substances, etc.), and on the other hand, their natural, that is, essential properties, as well as various accidental, that is, non-essential signs. Thus, "whatness" in the word nature is combined with "whatness", and in this sense, nature acts as a synonym for a widely understood quality.

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Combining the designation of essential, essential and accidental, random properties of things-substances, the word quality was preserved in the Russian language of subsequent periods of its development. V. I. Dahl, for example, interpreted this word as follows: quality - " property or belonging, everything that makes up the essence of a person or thing. Quantity means counting, weight and measure, to the question of how much; quality, to the question of what, explains the kindness, color and other properties of the object" (Dal V. I. Explanatory Dictionary of the living Great Russian language. SPb. - M., 1881. Vol. II).

In the modern specialized literature, both the concepts of the category of quality that we are considering are reflected: both" quality is nature "and"quality is what it is". So, A. G. Spirkin writes the following: "Quality is the certainty of an object, which is the internal basis of all its changes. Quality is that due to which an object for some time is an object identical to itself, to one degree or another different from other objects, and with a radical change in which it ceases to be such-it becomes another object" (Spirkin A. G. Origin of Consciousness, Moscow, 1960). In another work, we find the statement that an object has an infinite set of qualities that are common to other objects: "For example, a person has the quality of extension, gravity, metabolism, heredity, etc. These qualities characterize not only a person, but also other bodies; they are essentially qualities of matter in general, matter in general, living things in general, etc. "(Dialectical Materialism, Moscow, 1974).

In linguistics literature, quality is more often understood as an abstract property of an object, rather than as its essential definiteness. K. S. Aksakov, for example, gave this concept the following definition: "Quality is the abstract and understood general side of an object that finds fulfillment in it, but which does not necessarily belong to it and, as a general thing, can belong to it every phenomenon" (Aksakov K. S. Opyt russkoi grammatiki [Experience of Russian Grammar] / / Poln. sobr. soch. M., 1880. Vol. 3. Ch. 2). It is clear that the so-understood quality is precisely the" quality-kakovstvo "of Old Russian alphabet books or the" quality-property " of V. I. Dahl.

For the modern Russian language, the use of the word quality in the sense of "a set of essential, essential properties that give definiteness to the subject" belongs to terminological systems of special areas of knowledge, primarily philosophy. In ordinary, non-terminological usage, this word is interpreted as follows:" this or that property, a sign that determines the dignity of something " (Ozhegov S. I., Shvedova N. Yu.Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian language, Moscow, 1992). The quality can be high, medium, or low. However, a number of combinations with this word allow you to

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we can conclude that they often refer to the positively evaluated properties of something. This is the meaning of this word in combination with a quality mark, which, as many still probably remember, should have been assigned to products of particularly good quality, that is, distinguished by high quality. The same was reflected in the slogan of not so long ago: Fight for product quality. It is clear that workers were encouraged to fight for the high quality of what they produced.

I will give some examples from the oral speech of our days. Speaking at a very important meeting, Doctor of Philology, Dean of the Faculty of Philology says: "First of all, textbooks are very different in quality, and the quality of some of them is not worth talking about at all." With the first part of the statement, everything is clear: there are textbooks of high, medium and low quality. And how to understand the second part of the statement? If we say," We don't have to talk about a vacation this year, " then everything is clear, there will be no vacation. If someone states: "And we don't have to talk about your mind at all," is also understandable: in his opinion, the interlocutor does not have any mind. So, did the dean of the Faculty of Philology mean that there are textbooks that have no quality at all? Obviously, this is true, but then we have to conclude that when he spoke about quality, he meant exactly high quality.

The following example is even more illustrative. The editor of the magazine, a philologist by training, says about his publication:"We can say that quality is guaranteed." It is clear that in this case, too, the word quality should be understood as "high quality".

Recently, in one of the stores, I read a curious saying, the purpose of which is clear - to encourage customers not to skimp. It sounds like this:"The bitterness of loss of quality remains long after the sweetness of cheapness disappears." There is no need to explain that the bitterness of loss can only be experienced by losing something good, that is, the high quality of an un-purchased product due to excessive economy.

It is interesting to note that this particular meaning of the word quality is recorded among others in historical dictionaries: "a positive quality, a property of something. Her [Hagia Sophia's ] quality and majesty..."(SLRYA XI-XVII centuries. Issue 7).

It should also be added that for the adjective qualitative dictionaries fix the meaning "very good, high in quality" (see: Ozhegov S. I., Shvedova N. Yu. Edict op.).

It seems that the word quality, naming the entire scale of this trait (high-medium-low quality) at the same time, so to speak, is "inclined" to denote the positive, so-called "big" pole of this scale, that is, the word quality is often referred to as high quality. The same can be said for some

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other common feature names, such as quantity, temperature. The statement is important not quantity, but quality has the meaning "it is important not that there is a lot of something, but that it is something of high quality." If we say he has a fever, it means " he has a high fever."

It is interesting that in the folk speech of the XIX century, the word quality did not indicate the entire scale of the sign at all. It meant either "vice" or"dignity." Thus, V. I. Dahl wrote: "The people understand the quality of a person in a bad sense. It seems that there are no qualities behind it" (Dal. Vol. II). This word has the same meaning of "vice" in the title of Leo Tolstoy's play "All Qualities Come from her". The word quality has the meaning of "dignity" in the following example: "And this prefect. Miron Antonich, an intelligent man, in full quality... "(Naumov N. I. In the forgotten land. Stories from the life of Siberian peasants, St. Petersburg, 1882).

In the language of prisoners, as V. V. Vinogradov noted, referring to the" Dictionary of the Russian Language compiled by the nth Department of the Imperial Academy of Sciences", the meaning of the word quality is even more concretized, narrowed and begins to denote" crime"," fraud " (Vinogradov V. V. Istoriya slov. Moscow, 1994). This value is illustrated by the following example: "He does not know how to work and does not want to, and.. he will go wandering from the settlement, be caught with some quality on the way, and again end up in hard labor ( quality is a crime in the prison language) "(Melypin L. [P. F. Yakubovich]. In the world of the outcasts. Notes of a former convict. 2nd St. Petersburg, 1899-1902, vol. 1).

So, the word quality, which entered the Russian language in the XI century from Church Slavonic as a designation of one of the Aristotelian philosophical categories, lived a long and interesting life in it, descending, so to speak, from the philosophical heights to the prison bottom and eventually occupying a completely neutral place both in the language of science and in the spoken language.

One passing remark. The word kakovstvo, which defines the concept of "quality" through the pronoun kakov (in the Old Russian language it meant both "kakov" and "what"), has left the modern Russian language. But it is precisely this word, which seems somewhat clumsy to us today, that precisely and unambiguously defined this category of thinking by means of its completely transparent internal form. Perhaps, if it had been preserved in the language, the whole subsequent history of philosophical disputes over the concept of "quality" would have proceeded somewhat differently. At least, V. I. Dahl, as we have seen, felt the lack of such a word when, in giving his definition of "quality", he resorted to the pronoun what.

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