Вопросы ономастики (Dec 2023)
Exploring the Etymological Sources of the Place Name Knyazhaya guba
Abstract
The article attempts to identify the etymology of the place name Knyazhaya guba (name of a settlement in the Murmansk Region of Russia). The material for the study included the available written sources from different time periods, works of the Murmansk Region historians and local lore experts, field materials from the toponymic card indexes of the Institute of Linguistics, Literature and History of the Karelian Research Centre RAS and the Ural Federal University. Methods of historical and toponymic research were applied to analyze the corpus of versions, the central one being that this place name is linked to the Russian lexeme knyaz ‘prince.’ As a result of this multidimensional study accounting for historical and cultural context in which the local toponymic system was formed, socio-economic characteristics of the region, physiographical features of the site, the analysis of the available historical sources, and the linguistic and toponymic parameters of the name, the authors arrive at the conclusion that the Knyazh-place names in northernmost regions may have different etymological sources than in the rest of the Russian North. Where the most likely original motivation for a majority of places names with the Knyazh-stem is to mark princely land holdings (and the source here is the Russian knyaz’), the place names with the same stem in the north of Karelia and in the Murmansk Region may have non-Russian sources. The original motivation for the place name Knyazhaya guba is drawn from a natural attribute of the site — muddy bottom, wherefore the base of the name can be traced to the Sami language (Sami ńieș̌ș̌e ‘silt, mud; dirt’). The reinterpretation of the primary meaning presumably happened during integration of the place name into Russian through replacement of the original lexeme with a similarly sounding Russian one with a prosthetic consonant.
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