НАИМЕНОВАНИЯ ЛЮДЕЙ, ДОБЫВАЮЩИХ САМОЦВЕТЫ, В УРАЛЬСКИХ ГОВОРАХ

Abstract

The article examines both historical and modern names for people involved in the mining of Ural gemstones. The material for this analysis was obtained from dialectal and historical dictionaries. Besides that, the material was collected in the Urals through interviews with informants in 2020–2023, as well as through studying regional internet forums devoted to the topic and written sources, including historical documents. The article shows that in the 18th–19th centuries there was no organized gemstone mining taking place under the guidance and control of the government, which led to the absence of an ordered terminology in this sphere. The author concludes that people who mine for gemstones are usually named through lexemes denoting the key concepts of their worldview: gora (‘mountain’) and kamen’ (‘stone’). The article presents a comprehensive analysis of the words that are actively functioning today: gorshchik, kamen’shchik, khitnik. The author researches how these words and their meanings evolved along with the history of the concepts they denote. After analyzing historical and contemporary texts and interviewing the informants, the author identified the following meanings of the words. Gorshchik — ‘a person who extracts gemstones from bedrock’; kamen’shchik — ‘a person who extracts and/or processes gemstones, collects them’; khitnik — 1. (obsolete) ‘a person who mines for gemstones without a license’ 2. ‘a person who mines for gemstones unofficially’. In addition, the article determines the sociolinguistic status of the words under discussion and views their word-formational and axiological aspects. Some of these lexemes are not recorded in dictionaries and introduced into the scholarly discourse for the first time.