Archaic Social Vocabulary in Northern Lamentations by E. V. Barsov

Abstract

This article focuses on the understudied issue connected with the analysis and processing of the vocabulary of Northern Lamentations gathered by E. V. Barsov, which remains an important problem of modern linguistics and folklore studies. Many words present in this collection cannot be found in dialect dictionaries and therefore are not studied by dialectologists, etymologists or ethnolinguists. Such lexemes which could be considered archaic because of their disappearance from speech as early as the second half of the nineteenth century, frequently reflect rituals underlying them and archaic semantic models, ancient myths, and peculiarities of archaic thinking and, of course, need to be interpreted. In this article, the author continues the analysis of some lexemes from Northern Lamentations, particularly interesting from the point of view of semantics, motivation, word formation, and linguistic geography. The article refers to social vocabulary, i.e. some kinship terms (племнятки ‘nephews’, нешутка ‘a daughter-in-law’), terms denoting age and gender (благоденец ‘an infant’), names of people and objects making part of the wedding ritual (россказ ‘a great matchmaker’, стережатый, бережатый ‘a wedding sorcerer, guarding the wedding ceremony from evil curse’, перезовнички ‘male relatives of the bride’, правоплечничка ‘the bride’s female friend sitting on her right during the wedding’, верстать ‘to marry, to wed’, кайётная неделька ‘a period after the wedding when the newlyweds get disappointed with each other and repent’), characteristics of people, including epithets (нечехушка ‘a slattern, a bungler’, задумный ‘intimate, cherished’).

Keywords

• севернорусские причитания
• «Причитания Северного края» Е. В. Барсова
• архаичная лексика
• социальная лексика
• свадебный обряд
• лингвофольклористика
• диалектология
• семантико-мотивационная реконструкция
• этимология.