LINGUISTIC APPROACH TO THE INTERPRETATION OF THE CONCEPT OF ‘A COMMUNITY WITH A SHARED FUTURE FOR MANKIND’

Abstract

This article is devoted to the interpretation of the key Chinese diplomatic concept of ‘Renlei Mingyun gongtongti’ (‘a community with a shared future for mankind’) based on the theory of Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), which tries to reduce the semantics of all lexicons to a limited set of semantic primitives. The goals of the study are, firstly, to reveal the essence of this concept in Chinese, secondly, to analyze the options for its translation into English and Russian, and thirdly, to interpret it with the help of Minimal Language, which is the latest development of the theory of NSM. ‘Renlei Mingyun gongtongti’ consists of three parts: ‘renlei’ means the whole of humanity, ‘mingyun’ means all the good and bad events (opportunities and challenges) that humanity will face in the future, and ‘gongtongti’ means the mutual exchange of opportunities and responsibility to challenges. Due to the complexity of these concepts, questions of their perception also arise. These questions force us to find another way of interpretation, namely with the help of words that are semantically simpler, objective and almost universal in all languages of the world, which help to maximize the simplicity and universality of the interpretation of more complex diplomatic concepts. The scientific novelty of the study is that this is the first attempt by Chinese russianists to interpret this diplomatic concept using Minimal Language.