Вопросы ономастики (Dec 2019)
“Tricky Dmitry”: Linguistic and Cultural Connotations of one Russian Personal Name
Abstract
The article focuses on the semantic reconstruction of language units forming proprioappellative complex with the Russian name Dmitry and its variants (Mitry, Mitya, Mit’ka, Min’ka). These are dialectal appellatives with different meanings, e.g. khitry Mitry ‘a tricker,’ mitya ‘a butterfly,’ mit’ka-zuy ‘a sandpiper,’ as well as idiomatic expressions, e.g. (yego i) mit’koy zvali , (yego i) mit’ka pryal ‘about someone who suddenly disappears, runs away’. Special attention is paid to the analysis of the internal form of phraseological units represented by several variants, e.g. yego i min’koy / minkoy zvali , yego i vit’ka / van’ka pryal , kut’ka / tuchka pryal(a) . The author discusses the hypotheses elaborated by Valery Mokienko, Maria Ruth, and others, and offers her own interpretation of such units. The main point is the possibility of interaction, within one and the same morphosemantic field, of various diminutive forms of the name Dmitry (and possibly Mikhail > min’ka) with different verbal bases — pomnit’ ‘to remember,’ cf. pominay kak zvali according to the version of Valery Mokienko, and minut’, minovat’ ‘to pass’. The proposed etymology of the set phrase (yego i) mit’ka pryal and its variants considers the homonymy (possibly homogeneous) of the verbs priast’, prianut’ ‘to rush, to slip away’, and priast’, priadu ‘to spin’, as well as the polysemy of the idiom itself, which can describe different situations of loss — the “dynamic” (disappearing of the subject of action) and the “possessive” (disappearing of the object of action). In this case, the key for the idiom’s internal form can be found in one of the daughter dialects — kut’ka pryal(a) , where kut’ka means ‘dog, puppy, hen, chicken,’ i.e. “disappear = run away like a chicken or a dog” (Maria Ruth’s version). The author concludes, that the personal name Dmitry has systemic linguistic (non-precedent-based) and cultural (precedent-based) connotations and discusses their value and possible projections on the language image of the name bearer.
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