Вопросы ономастики (Nov 2013)
Medieval Karelian Calendar Names: A Cognitive Perspective
Abstract
The article focuses on calendar personal names recorded in the 15–17th centuries Russian and Swedish manuscripts written in Karelia. Revealing the cognitive potential of this historical stratum of names, the author analyzes the frequency of full (official) and modified forms of calendar names, the regional peculiarities of their linguistic adaptation, their ethnolinguisitic and social status, as well as the functioning of calendar names in the regional onomastic system. The analysis shows that the calendar onomasticon holds the leading positions, which reflects important axiological and mental shifts in the people’s culture. The list of most frequent Christian names of the region generally coincides with the onomastic data related to other Russian territories of the same period. The conservation of the name nomenclature is due to family traditions, namely, to familial practices of naming. However, the adaptation and distribution of names display some regional features, particularly in the frequency of different groups of anthroponyms. The peripheral situation of the region and the presence of Balto-Fennic population which adapted the Russian calendar athroponymicon determined the “conservatism” of the calendar names nomenclature: for naming, they selected the names which were better adapted and more extensively used among Russians. The formation of modified names depended mostly on the morphemic structure of the Russian language, regional features being relatively insignificant. The frequency of modified forms of names correlates with the genre of the manuscript and the scribe’s arbitrariness.
