On Some Nominations of Children in the History of Russian and Chinese Languages

The article is devoted to the history of children's nominations in Russian and Chinese languages. The difference of time range of factual materials used in the article is due to the particularity of the historical development and the fixation of Russian and Chinese languages. The process reveals a serious typological similarity. This is manifested in the possibility of the formation of a large number of nominations from a small number of ancient roots, stability and preservation of the root material, and also in the fact that the semantics of lexemes in both languages can pass through the same stages of their evolution. The meanings of both languages may contain such semantic components as “slave”, “servant, worker”. There are also differences in semantic development between languages. In Russian, the semantics evolve in the direction of age: “child” > “young man”. In Chinese, the process can go in the opposite direction-from naming adults to naming children.