Matching Music and Performance Terminology in the Russian and Chinese Languages.

The article focuses on studying the etymology and inner form of musical and performance terms in the Russian and Chinese languages. Lexical units taken from the Russian and Chinese-Russian dictionaries of musical terms served as the research basis. The author applied the following research methods: descriptive, inductive-deductive, comparative and componential analysis, and specific material sampling. It was ascertained that the Italian language was the main source of borrowed musical terms for both Russian and Chinese. However, in the Russian language the predominant method of borrowing is transliteration, whereas in Chinese it is semantic loan translation. Transliterated Russian terms present an unclear inner form to the native speaker, and they are mostly used in the sphere of musical performance. Chinese musical terms are comprised of common lexical units and may include markers indicating that the given term is related to a certain subject group, which makes their inner form obvious to the native speaker.