The Adjective “Sacred” in Metalinguisticsof the Language: Functional-semantic Research

The article is devoted to an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the semantics of the adjective “sacred”, the Indo-European root of which was the basis of the Latin token saker, initially illustrating a multi-pole understanding - from the divine to the demonic, from the sublime to the secularized. Particular attention is paid to the definitions of the adjective in the explanatory, etymological dictionaries of the XІX-XX centuries, in mythological representations, in folklore texts, in calendar, family and other rituals, in phraseology, paremiology, etc. In a historical retrospective, an analysis of changes in the semantics of the adjective “sacred” revealed the pre-Christian, Christian, secularized stages of lexical-semantic variations. A comprehensive study confirms the transformation of not only worldview systems, but also language tools that contribute to the formation in the minds of Russian people of the meta-idea of the adjective “sacred” in order to identify the cultural dominance and actively search and restore its semantic core.