Looking back at the end of the 20th century and the past century of Russian history, it is impossible to ignore such a tragic page as emigration. It was the political events that shook up the whole country that were among the main reasons that caused a complex and interesting history of the word in the Russian language, both from a semantic and pragmatic point of view. Dictionaries give the following definition of the concept: "emigration is a forced or voluntary relocation from one's homeland to another country for economic, political or religious reasons" (Bolshoy Tolkovyi slovar russkogo yazyka, SPb., 1998). However, one should not think that emigration is a fairly new phenomenon: it has been going on for hundreds of years in history. Perhaps, the Slavs first got acquainted with this concept with the adoption of Christianity:its counterpart in Old Slavonic and Old Russian was the word exodus.
Exodus is a Church Slavonic word; in church literature, it accurately calculated the Greek eksodos (Latin exodus): eks(ek) "from, with, from", odos "road, way". As you know, in the Bible (Old Testament) this word is called the second book of the Mosaic pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy); in Judaism, this collection of books of Moses is called "Torah" (law). The book of Exodus describes a biblical historical event: after the beginning of the oppression by the Pharaohs, the Jews left Egypt under the leadership of Moses and their miraculous salvation (the parting of the sea) before the Pharaoh's soldiers caught up with the fugitives. Obviously, this is one of the first historical references to forced mass displacement of people.
The word exodus remained high, being used mainly in the church-book type of the Old Russian language; its equivalent in the Old Russian language was exit. And if the biblical meaning of the term exodus needs to be interpreted now, then even before the revolution of 1917, when religion was part of the life of society, there was ...
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