A THEMATIC CLASSIFICATION OF RELIGIOUS-CHRISTIAN VOCABULARY OF RUSSIAN-UDMURT DICTIONARIES BY G. Ye. VERESHCHAGIN

Abstract

The article examines the vocabulary of religious-Christian content in the handwritten Russian-Udmurt dictionaries by the first Udmurt writer and outstanding scientist, educator and missionary, clergyman G. Ye. Vereshchagin. There is no exact information about the time when the manuscripts were written. One of them was presumably created at the end of the 19 - beginning of the 20 centuries, before the adoption of the Russian spelling reform in 1918, since the letter ъ is inconsistently encountered at the very beginning of the dictionary in lexemes ending in a hard consonant. Another manuscript can be dated to the period after the adoption of the Russian spelling reform, when the Cyrillic letters ѣ, ө and ъ were excluded from the Russian alphabet. The author of the manuscripts selected appropriate primordial Udmurt equivalents to words of religious content or used borrowings (mainly from the Russian language), and was guided by the following considerations: 1) he used Udmurt words that arose in the depths of paganism, which by the time the manuscripts were compiled had acquired a completely Christian meaning (Kyldysin tӧre 'Archangel'); 2) adapted concepts that had a slightly different, everyday meaning (viz sonany, gavyldyns, aldans ‘to tempt’); 3) terms without direct correspondences in the Udmurt language are often translated by a combination of words or interpretation (umoytem Inmar vyle veras ‘blasphemer’); 4) borrowed from Russian or other languages (Archirey, Arquerey ‘Bishop’). The study of the lexical and semantic features of written attestations in the context of developing the national corpus of the Udmurt language and filling it with not only absolutely new, but also to some extent forgotten and revisited elements is a very important linguistic activity. The linguistic actualization of religious vocabulary contributes to the recovery of speech assets and registers in a significant number of dictionary nominalizations by designating concepts and phenomena of the spiritual and religious sphere of the Udmurt language.