spontaneous living and spontaneous relationships between the individual-psychic
mechanisms and the contents of consciousness, then the secondary symbols appear at
the level of the mythological system, which as a system is itself the result of ideological
(scientific, cultural, etc.) elaboration and interpretation [6, p. 134]. In this case, terms,
too, as phenomena of scientific mythology pertain to secondary symbols.
In our study, the symbol and the term are treated as cultural phenomena. Let us
turn to the consideration of culture from the point of view of the semiotic nature of its
components. In a relatively short period of time, many social contacts take place in the
society. Such a multitude of social interactions is possible due to the presence of a
broad semiotic field in the society. A natural language, artifacts of culture, as well as
socially accepted symbols, which include various sign systems, should be indicated
among the important components of that field. Thanks to the semiotic field, the actions
of people become ordered and coordinated to a certain degree. Culture as a semiotic
system is the most universal, structured in a sophisticated way and stable over time.
Any finished object of culture constitutes a semiotic system organized in a certain
manner. Consequently, any such object can be ‛read’, since it is, by its genesis, intended
for that. Any object of culture has a symbolic language inherent in it. The perception
of an object of culture is the process of de-symbolization thereof. That becomes
possible only when a symbolic language is accessible as a holistic semiotic system at
all its levels (semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic one). The process of de-symbolization
is long and complicated one resulting in the meaning of the word becoming narrower.
The semantic correction caused by the loss of a symbolic foundation determined the
narrowing of the scope of functioning of a word.
It should also be noted that a human being's view of the world is egocentric. The
manifestation of the egocentric view of the world in a language allows one to take the
human body as a starting point in the process of localizing objects in the surrounding
space [7, p. 271; 8, p. 110]. The latter is important for understanding how a language
was formed.
Let us examine, using specific examples, the process of restoring the semantic
foundations of lexical units of the legal terminology.
Anstifter (m) means ‛instigator; inciter’ [8, p. 37]. Anstifter ist, wer vorsätzlich
einen anderen zu dessen vorsätzlich begangener rechtswidriger – nicht notwendig
schuldhafter – Tat bestimmt hat [9, p. 20]. ‛An instigator is the one who encourages
the other to deliberately commit a wrongful – not necessarily a culpable – act’. The
etymological dictionary provides the following data: anstiften stiften, the Middle
High German, the Old High German stiften, the Middle Low German stiften ‛gründen,
ins Werk setzen, einrichten’ meaning ‛to found, to implement, to arrange’, Old English
stiht [i] an "regieren, ordnen, einrichten" (to manage, to put in order, to arrange) [10,
p. 814]. Let us examine the prefix an-. This prefix is a variant of the prefix ad- meaning
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