REFLECTION OF THE NATIONAL MENTALITY IN THE PERCEPTION OF HISTORICAL APHORISM (A SPECIAL CASE OF THE IMPLEMENTATION OF FRANCOPHONIE-RUSSOPHONIE)

The work is devoted to the study of the French language role in European society from the 16th century to our time. The peculiarity of the national mentality is always manifested in the evaluative attitude of the subject to the surrounding objective reality. The purpose of the article is to identify the specifics of the linguistic perception of the French language in the 16–20 centuries: the French language is considered in a diachronic aspect as a means of international cultural dialogue: from the early French period to the period of the modern French language. The purpose of the article, along with the analysis of specific textual material, is also to study and describe the historical and cultural context. The empirical material consists of various versions of the famous quotation about the role of the French language attributed to Charles V, which we have discovered in the works of writers and public speakers of the 16–20 centuries. The work is of an interdisciplinary nature and is performed from the standpoint of the linguistic approach with the involvement of historical data and related social Sciences (political science, sociology, cultural studies). The article examines the history of aphorism and analyzes the value attitude to the French language viewed by foreign Francophones (and Russophones) through the analysis of value judgments in the text. We came to the following conclusions. First, the famous statement of Charles V is a hypertext with many implicit references, referring the reader to the archetype: nonextant original source (that perhaps never actually existed). Secondly, by examining the various versions of this quotation that appeared and were published at different times, it is possible to consider separate “cultural layers” of the Francophone culture of different historical epochs. Thus, the closest version of the quotation to the archetype was found in a Latin work written in the late 16th — early 17th century, where the French language is characterized as linguam nobilem (“noble language”). Later, in French versions in the 17th and 18th centuries, French is rated as français aux hommes (“French for men”), and in the XXth century as le français pour me parler à moi — même (lit.: “French to talk to myself”, that is, “language for myself”, part of the personal space, part of the true “I”). Thus, the perception of the French language as a carrying agent of French values and French culture is determined by the system of norms that make up the content of the collective consciousness in a particular epoch in the 16–20 centuries.