Contrastive Analysis of English, Russian and Hebrew Yellow Idioms

Abstract

The problem studied in the article is relevant and important for the Russian and foreign scientific community since color Hebrew idioms have not yet been described against the background of numerous similar studies in other languages and the comparison of idioms with the lexeme yellow/желтый/ צהוב (further YIS) didn’t do still. The material of the work was about 140 yellow idioms: about 70 English, 40 Russian, and 30 Hebrew. They were collected from trilingual electronic lexical, phraseological dictionaries, and Internet searches and analyzed with qualitative and quantitative contextual-functional, semantic and cultural-linguistic analysis within the lingua culturological approach. The article proposes the following YIS classification based on microsystems consisting of meaning associative chains with logically and semantically related relations that cover physical and mental characteristics, and a large number of human activity areas and allows the inclusion of new YIS in the future: 1. Object optical color.1.1 Nature. Natural Phenomena, Physical Objects - Geography; Fauna; Body - skin color; Reference color. 1.2 Human activity. Reference Color; Food; Medicine - Medicines; Sports; Information - Traffic signals - Alerts; Terrorism; Employment; Vote; 1.3 Moral and ethical issues. Sensation; Bribe. Unique YIS, enriching the linguistic picture of the world, in English related, in particular, to such topics as Cowardice, Goal Achievement Strategy, and in Russian - Acquisitiveness, Inexperience. In the 21st century, YIS are of great importance in road signs and danger warnings in medicine, meteorology, and civil and defense fields. The results of the work can be effectively used in comparative, cultural, lexicographic, and lexicological work and contribute to SLA, human and automatic translation of idioms.