The Role and Status of Biblical Vocabulary in the English Lexicon

The relevance of the study lies in the interest of world philological science in the linguistic aspects of the analysis of the biblical text, which has become a rich source of catchphrases. Despite the large number of works devoted to the study of English and Ukrainian biblical idioms, the absence in modern Ukrainian scientific literature of a detailed linguistic description of these linguistic units and the features of their reproduction when translating from English into Ukrainian requires further study of these issues. Therefore, addressing the consideration of biblical idioms in the translation aspect is relevant. The object of the study was biblical idioms collected by the method of continuous sampling from monolingual and bilingual phraseological dictionaries of the compared languages. The aim of the article is to carry out a comparative linguistic analysis of biblical idioms in English and Ukrainian, to determine their stylistic functions and to explore ways of adequate translation. An attempt has been made to give a systematic characteristic of biblical idioms as a layer of Ukrainian and English phraseology, to carry out their comparative linguistic analysis, to determine their stylistic functions and features of translation. It has been concluded that despite the presence of a common source, parallel phraseologisms of biblical origin in English and Ukrainian languages have semantic, lexical and grammatical differences, which are both linguistic and extralinguistic in nature. Important extralinguistic factors include, for example, the time and conditions of the appearance of biblical translations in Ukraine and Great Britain, the history, customs, ideals and mentality of each of the peoples. Along with extralinguistic factors, linguistic ones also operate. Since Ukrainian and English languages belong to different language groups (Slavic and Germanic, respectively) and are characterized by a minimal number of phonetic, morphological and other correspondences. They also differ typologically: modern Ukrainian is a language of synthetic structure, modern English is analytical. This feature affects not only the general patterns of functioning of lexical and phraseological units, but also the different techniques of word and form formation.