Linguistics and literary studies department

2.2 Proverbs and sayings with toponymic realias
A study of English proverbs and sayings that contain a toponym showed that these texts often do not have their Russian-language equivalents. In the case of the presence of foreign language equivalents of proverbs to sayings with toponyms, these toponym equivalents, as a rule, do not include. This conclusion is explained by the peculiarities of words-realias, which are designations of unique objects and phenomena of the environment and reality. Being truly folk creations, proverbs and sayings due to their uniqueness, as a rule, belong to the culture of only one people and have no analogues in the culture of another. The existence in English and Russian cultures of such a pair of equivalent proverbs with toponyms as "To carry coals to Newcastle" and " Ездить в Тулу со своим самоваром " is explained, firstly, by the presence both in Great Britain and in Russia of places famous for their the coal industry, and, secondly, the coincidence of thought associations when expressing the concept of inappropriate actions. Despite the equivalence of the verbalized concepts, the realias-toponyms "Tula" and "Newcastle" absolutely unmistakably relate each proverb to a specific culture.
A large number of English proverbs and sayings with place names do not have their Russian-language equivalents and are quite difficult to understand.
The English proverb "To be on the high-road / highway to Needham" means "to be on the verge of ruin / bankruptcy." To define the concept of a saying, it is necessary to identify its prototypical scene, which must be associated with such a locality as Needham. The use of regional geography data does not give any special characteristic of the small village of Needham Market that existed near the town of Ipswich. This suggests that for the figurative and metaphorical implementation of the concept of ruin / bankruptcy, the British probably created the toponym word "Needham", which is fixed in this saying and is a derivative of the noun "need" (need, poverty). The national specificity of the picture of the world is revealed in this text at a purely linguistic level. The addition of a suffix, which is quite often found in the names of English cities (for example, Nottingham, Birmingham), gives figurative weight to the saying (an image that does not exist in any culture) and national flavor (a toponym word created by the people acts as a concept).
The proverb "To send to Coventry" in the meaning "to turn away from someone" has in its composition a toponym that calls the really existing reality, and is used to convey the idea of ​​boycotting, ignoring and dislike for someone. The genetic prototype of this text reflects the following information: first, the prison in the city of Coventry in the 17th century was a place of exile and exile of the royalists; secondly, the hostility of the inhabitants of the city to the soldiers stationed in their houses became the reason that the service in Coventry was considered an unwanted duty, an expression of public censure, alienation from other people. From the above, we can conclude that, like other topographic proverbs and sayings, this linguistic unit first represented the position and property of a certain place (first picture of the world), and then transformed into an expression of a more voluminous figurative concept (second picture of the world). In Russian, there is no equivalent of this proverb, which does not at all mean that there are no prisons and other places of exile in Russia. The fact that there were also famous prisons in Russia, but their names are not found in Russian phraseology, in no way speaks of the absence of such realias among the Russian-speaking people. A study of Russian proverbs and sayings showed that they do not reflect the concept of boycotting and dislike at all. This can be explained by such a feature of the Russian character as passivity, unwillingness to actively influence others, the desire to step aside.
Thus, the absence of conceptual equivalents to floorboards and sayings of another language confirms the explanation that representatives of different linguocultural communities perceive and segment the normal reality around them in different ways, in accordance with their worldviews, therefore the fund of proverbs and sayings of different languages ​​often does not coincide. lexical and conceptual expression, and sometimes it is not possible to draw conceptual parallels of texts of the same genres due to the lack of expression of any concept in one of the compared languages. The proverb "To talk Billingsgate" is one of the few English sayings with a toponym component that have a Russian equivalent ("Ругаться, как базарная торговка "). Its prototype is the large fish market in London - Billingsgate. Despite the fact that the Russian proverb does not contain a toponym, it is close to its English equivalent in the prototypical scene, which is also a market with its inherent noise. And the abuse of the traders and bargainers. Only in English is the saying characterized by greater illustrativeness and concreteness of the image, since it mentions a specific place - Billingsgate - the most noisy due to its large territory. In the Russian version, there is a derivative of the word “базар”, which is a common name for any particular market and, accordingly, is less specific and more generalized. Despite the different lexical units used to convey the same concept (proper noun and common noun), the main associative connections coincide among the Russian and English peoples, for whom swearing is a characteristic feature of the bazaar. But even in such fairly close equivalents, we find certain differences in the representations of the world. The differences are observed in the associations caused by these language units. So, for example, the markets in England and Russia differ both in the goods sold, working hours, monetary unit and measures of weight and volume of the goods sold, and in the composition of traders and traders, therefore, in the minds of representatives of different linguocultural communities, associations caused by these texts will differ significantly.
Thus, proverbs and sayings containing toponyms acquaint the foreign cultural recipient with the peculiarities of the life of another people and the geography of his country. Moreover, being indicators of national peculiarities in the picture of the world of the people in whose language they were created, these texts, in comparison with the texts of another culture, serve as good evidence of both the discrepancy between the ways of expressing the same concepts by different peoples, and the discrepancy between the associative links that arise when the concept is perceived.