PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS WITH BIBLICAL, MYTHICAL AND CLASSICAL NAMES IN THE ENGLISH AND RUSSIAN LANGUAGES

Abstract.The paper describes a case study of English and Russian phraseological units with biblical, mythical and classical names conducted with the purpose of identifying English-Russian phraseological and non-phraseological counterparts. It begins with a brief review of contemporary studies of phraseological units with proper names in different languages. The main goal of the research was to find out the ratio of phraseological and non-phraseological English-Russian counterparts. The conclusions are that in spite of common European cultural heritage and the Bible being the main source of the majority of phraseological units with biblical names both in the English and Russian languages the number of non-phraseological counterparts exceeds the number of English-Russian phraseological equivalents and analogues. The hypothesis put before our research was that the number of English-Russian phraseological counterparts exceeds greatly the number of English PHs with biblical, classical and mythical name that don’t have phraseological counterparts in the Russian language. The cause of such hypothesis was seen in the common European cultural heritage and the influence of the Bible on the development of both languages.The results of our investigation show a bit different percentage of English-Russian phraseological and non-phraseological counterpartsKeywords: phraseological unit, proper names, phraseological counterparts, equivalents, analogues, descriptive translation, lexical translation, combined translation