Oriental Studies (Oct 2021)
Lexical and Semantic Analysis of the Toponymy of the Chuvash Village of Bolshoe Aldarkino, Borskii District of the Samara Region
Abstract
The article deals with the inventory of toponyms of the village of Bolshoe Aldarkino, Borskii district, Samara region, introduced and analyzed for the first time by the present author. The village was founded by the descendants of Virjal Chuvash in 1767. The research database has been formed by the evidence on the toponymics of the village and its surrounding area collected by the author from locals and local historians during his field trip in 2018. Also, for a comparative analysis of the toponyms under study, he has made use of the relevant material collected by him in other Chuvash villages of the Samara Volga region in the period between 2015 and 2019; these are first of all the villages in Borskii, Pokhvistnevskii, and Isaklinskii districts. As a result, it was possible to identify the principal elements of the toponymic items of the Chuvash idiolect of Bolshoe Aldarkino, their particular forms and semantics. To illustrate, such terms as var (ravine) or oshken´(street) have peculiarities in their structure, forms, and semantics, which make them distinctly characteristic of this particular Chuvash dialect in contrast to those spoken in the neighboring Chuvash villages. Most of the names presented in the article are etymologized from the Chuvash and Russian languages, a number of toponyms are currently de-etymologized, but there are no grounds to refer them to any other language. There is no substrate layer in the toponymic space under study. Some geographical names display the features of the Virjal dialect of the Chuvash language, including Odar, Vyras Oshken, Tikhon Oshken, etc. A few geographical items of the toponymic space of Bolshoe Aldarkino have convincing lexical and semantic parallels in the toponymic spaces of other Chuvash villages in the region, as well as of other settlements of Chuvash speakers.
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