From Materials for A Dictionary of Russian Place Name Derivatives

Abstract

The article presents some materials for a dictionary of Russian derivatives of place names belonging to dialects and the national language vocabulary and retrieved from various dictionaries (including The Dictionary of Russian Popular Dialects, The Dictionary of the Contemporary Russian Language), unpublished card indexes as well as from the Russian National Corpus. It is demonstrated that geographical names of Russia, namely, macrotoponyms (e. g., Sibir’ ‘Siberia’ → sibirka ‘a big piece of boiled meat’, Don ‘the Don river’ → donskaya shuba ‘a woman’s neat fur coat’) and microtoponyms (e. g., the Fedorovtsevskaya hole in Arkhangelsk region → fedorovtsevskiy kofey ‘a drink on the basis of polypore’) serve as productive stems for the derivatives in question. The lexicographic interpretation of the material is based on the thematic principle. The authors describe several thematic groups as being part of a wider group of words designating objects of material culture: “Clothes, footwear and head dress”, “Food and drinks”, “Agricultural instruments” and “Transport”. The authors indicate the toponymic stem of each derivative. The materials have an ethnolinguisitic value for being a source of ethnocultural information, as well as having an etymological and onomasiological significance.

Keywords

• Russian toponymy
• toponymic lexicography
• derivation from place names
• Russian dialect vocabulary
• thematic groups of words