duša and soul, mind
duša (душа)
Here are some passages from the first chapter of Wierzbicka's Semantics, Culture, and Cognition:
Anglo-Saxon culture doesn't encourage much talk about 'souls', and English prose doesn't seem to tolerate as many references to people's souls as typical Russian prose would. If the translator of a Russian novel does try to render duša as soul wherever possible (rather than simply omit it), the high frequency of the word soul gives the English prose a slightly odd flavour. This can be illustrated with the following passage from Robert Chandler's translation (Grossman 1985) of Vasily Grossman's (1980) novel Zizn' i sud'ba (Life and fate):
I'm used to looking into people's eyes for symptoms of diseases— glaucoma, cataract. Now I can no longer look at people's eyes like that; what I see now is the reflection of the soul. A good soul, Vityenka! A sad, good-natured soul, defeated by violence, but at the same time triumphant over violence. A strong soul, Vitya! ... Sometimes I think that it's not so much me visiting the sick, as the other way around—that the people are a kind doctor who is healing my soul. (1985:87)
Later in the book she adds that 'There is a considerable Russian vocabulary for the expressing of the emotions, 'pouring out one's soul' being one of the most common. For many Russians this is the most valued aspect of living. Indeed, feeling and expressing the emotions you feel is the sign that you are alive; if you don't feel, you are to all intents and purposes dead. The word duša (душа) came into vivid focus for Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, a Polish resistance fighter who spent several years in an NKVD camp. Through hearing Russian soul music (duša music) he came to understand the concepts associated with the Russian word as containing a sense of a deep well of selfhood, a private, deeply personal place of identity and meaning, a stage on which the most important dramas of selfhood occur, and almost another bodily organ. Here's the passage from Herling's book A World Apart:
Musical instruments were the most precious and most sought-after objects in the camp. The Russians love music quite differently from Europeans; for them it is not a mere distraction, or even an artistic experience, but a reality more real than life itself. I often saw prisoners playing their instruments, plucking the strings of a guitar, delicately pressing the keys of an accordion, drinking in music from a mouth-organ hidden in the grasp of both hands—full of great sadness, as if they were exploring the most painful places of their souls. Never has the word soul [i.e., duša] seemed so understandable and so natural to me as when I heard their awkward, hastily improvised compositions, and saw other prisoners lying on the bunks, staring vacantly into space and listening with religious concentration. The surrounding silence seemed to emphasise the power of that music and the emptiness in which it resounded like the sharp, sorrowful tones of a shepherd's pipe on a deserted mountainside. The player became one with his instrument, he pressed it hard to his chest, stroked it with his hands and, hanging his head reflectively, gazed with misty despair at the inanimate object which, at one dexterous touch, spoke and expressed for him all that he could never put into words. Sometimes these musicians were asked to stop: 'It tears one's soul.'
The question, I suppose, is whether or not Russians feel the intensity and richness of selfhood because they can say it, or because they say it because they, for historical-cultural reasons, have experienced open expression of strong feeling that Western, perhaps especially Anglo-American culture, has not encouraged, thus giving them stronger neural impetus toward vocabulary creation.
(I can't resist giving you this URL, where there is a faint glimpse of duša-hood in a few faces: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/ )
When we compare the variety and intensity of the conception with our vocabulary of selfhood, and think about Russian complaints about English soullessness, we see some significant differences, which Wierzbicka encapsulates in her ending claim that Russians say English-speakers don't have a word for that most important part of selfhood, duša, and English-speakers lament that Russians don't have a word for "mind."
She argues that while in English soul narrowed in meaning to exclude the purely psychological in favor of religious meanings, mind narrowed to exclude the realms of emotion and of value in favor of the purely intellectual. She says, "It has often been pointed out that in Western culture a split occurred between intelligence and emotions. . .. It is important to add, however, that theis separation of 'thinking' from 'feeling' was accompanied by another split: that between the psychological and the moral aspect of the human person. . ..[A]the time when the human person is seen as composed, essentially, of a body and a mind, that mind is seen as purely psychological (with the emphasis on the intellect, not on the emotions."
Using what she calls the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (see subpage of that name), her corrective to what she sees as the limitations of the Swadesh list of linguistic universals (see subpage of that name), she explicates our words this way:
soul
modern earlier
one of two parts of a person one of two parts of a person
one cannot see it one cannot see it
it is part of another world it is part of another world
good beings are part of that world good beings are part of that world
things are not part of that world things are not part of that world
because of this part a person can because of this part a person can
be a good person be a good person
other people can't know what things
happen in that part of a person
sometimes the person doesn't know
what these things are*
these things can be good or bad
Russian duša does not have this element
mind
modern earlier
one of two parts of a person one of two parts of a person
one cannot see it one cannot see it
because of this part a person can because of this part a person can
think and know think and know and feel and value
The literary evidence in the OED confirms this history. An interesting addition comes from Shipley's identification of the Indo-European root as men, "to have one's mind roused; hence, both to love and be mad . . . also to think, remember, warn, foretell . . . "
Related words include mantra; Greek mantis, mathema; Latin derived English words maniac, and with the negative a- prefix amuse.