Известия Уральского федерального университета. Серия 2: Гуманитарные науки (Jan 2024)
On Studying the Mountain Mythonymy of the Urals: Mythonyms Motivated by Social Vocabulary
Abstract
This article discusses the mountain metonymy of the Urals, i.e. the designation of supernatural anthropomorphic creatures that store the riches of the subsoil (minerals and metals) and contribute to or hinder their discovery, extraction, and processing. Russian mountain mythology has been studied by folklorists, but the linguistic aspect is only beginning to be explored. The material for the article was collected in the field between 2020 and 2023, and derived from dictionaries, folklore texts, and authorial literature. The author mostly focuses on Middle Ural and South Ural mythonyms; for comparison, the article draws on material of other zones connected with the Urals geographically or historically (Bashkiria, Siberia). The article provides detailed descriptions of the motivations of mythonyms and the conditions for the appearance of nominations. Mountain mythonymy can be divided into several groups depending on the motivation, i. e. the thematic group of vocabulary underlying the mythonym. This article analyses mythonyms motivated by social vocabulary, namely, denoting a person or kinship: золотая девка (golden girl), каменная девка (stone girl), горная девка (mountain girl), чудская девица (Chudskaya maiden), горный батюшка (mountain father), горная матка (mountain mother), Шубин (Shubin), etc. The article reveals and explains the specificity of Ural mountain mythonymy: thus, the девка token is used for the nomination of female spirits, whereas the баба nomination is characteristic of traditional Russian peasant mythology. An expressive feature of Ural mountain mythonymy is the presence of mythonyms formed from toponyms (девка Азовка, девка Дедюрка). The article proves that the formation of mountain mythonymy was influenced by the mythology of the Russian peasantry, the mythology of the autochthonous peoples of the Urals (Turkic and Finno-Ugric), as well as the terminology of mining actively developing in the Urals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
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