<i>Seven shaburs, but one garment:</i> peasant outerwear <i>shabur(a)</i>

Abstract

The study considers a dialect lexeme shabur(a), which refers to peasant outerwear made of coarse homespun material. In the dictionaries of the literary language, it is defined as a “light caftan”, but dialect materials indicate the incompleteness of such interpretation. The study argues that the lexeme shabur(a) has a broad system of meanings, including ‘demi-season clothing’, ‘men’s/women’s outerwear’, ‘worn, torn outerwear’ or ‘worn casual outerwear used for work’. However, we often use the word shabur(a) to describe a garment of a specific cut made of a certain material. For instance, mainly in the Urals this word was used to denote clothes made of coarse canvas fabric, in Siberia — from coarse fabric in which canvas (linen) warp threads were intertwined with wool weft. In different traditions, the style of the product is extremely variable. Such elements may differ: silhouette (straight / flared, loose / fitted, with or without assemblies around the waist / from the back), length (long / knee-length / short), ways of buttoning (buttoned / non-buttoned, single-breasted / double-breasted), collar (absent / stand / turn-down, narrow / wide), lining (absent / up to the waist). Combined in different variations, these features provided a) the mosaicism of local variants shabur(a) while preserving the common name, b) the specifics of the semantics development. The study indicates New meanings of the word shabur(a) and its numerous derivatives, word usage in proverbs and riddles, actualizing the semes ‘outer’, ‘rough, hard’, ‘badly protecting from the cold’, ‘very indigent’. The article concludes that due to the broad ethno-socio-cultural context of the realia and their names, the lexeme shabur(a) has a significant variability of the denotative basis, which makes it difficult to determine the scope of its conceptual content and semantic structure.