КОМПАРАТИВИСТИКА УДК [811.161.1:811.111:811.222.1]′276.6:665.6 ENGLISH BORROWINGS IN RUSSIAN AND PERSIAN: A COMPARATIVE STUDY ON PETROLEUM TERMINOLOGY M. Faal-Hamedanchi Medling s.r.o Papнrovб 525, Liberec, Czech Republic, 460 01 The article reviews language borrowing as a cause of denominative variation in terminology and applies a descriptive and comparative approach to identify which roles receptor languages play in employment and adaptation of foreign terms. <...> INTRODUCTION Borrowing is defined as the introduction of phonological, morphological, lexical, and syntactic items from one language or variety into another. <...> The attitude of each language toward borrowing varies depending on its structure, social and cultural sphere and even language policy, which is in practice in the society. <...> English borrowings take different forms in Russian and Persian. <...> Some words are adopted in form and sense, others are expressed in words (calques), moreover, new lexical items or meanings may be created to describe English words (neologisms). <...> Due to this fact, Russian and Persian languages maintain different attitudes toward new terms and expressions. <...> This study reviews Persian and Russian oil and gas terminology system and the attitudes of both languages toward borrowing in choices of lexicons, morphemes, translation and abbreviations, from English as the donor language, 1. <...> LEXICAL BORROWINGS The simplest (and therefore most common) borrowings are lexical or vocabulary borrowings. <...> As to English, loanwords are called ‘Anglicism’, or items taken from Eng73 Вестник РУДН, серия Теория языка. <...> Семантика, 2014, № 4 lish without any modification. “While discussing borrowings from English, we have to keep in mind that the English lexicon itself contains a high degree of loanwords. <...> The motivation for this choice may be for some reasons of prestige but also for the communicative effectiveness and the lack of Persian script precision, as well. <...> Persian writing system is a Perso-Arabic script and short vowels are not marked in written texts, which results in different possibilities of pronunciation. <...> In addition, the lack of adapted standards and precise script result in graphic variations. <...> To prevent ambiguity some authors use footnotes in order to give the English variThe English script in Russian scientific text is not as common as in Persian. <...> The Russian writing system, although differs from that of English, involves less ambiguity in transcribing English <...>