Northern Russian Etymologies: порочка, пёрыш, пёрко

Abstract

This article puts forward etymological interpretations of several Northern Russian lexemes: порочка ‘a vessel in the form of a birch bark cylinder with a wooden bottom and a cover for the storage and transportation of milk, cottage cheese, flour, etc.’, ‘a scoop’, ‘a big reel of thread’, ‘a bunt’, etc., пёрыш ‘a winch, a hoist’, пёрко ‘a spindle, a bobbin of the spinning wheel’. According to the author, the source of these lexemes is the Finnic word family with the meaning of spinning and round forms: Fin. py o r a , py o ri a , Kar. p uo r a , Veps. p o ruda and others. To solve this etymological problem, the author refers to denotatively similar Finnic word families and explicates the logic of their semantic organisation. The discovered principles of semantic organisation of these word families indicate that very probably there were derivatives in the Finnic word family py o r a , whose semantics coincides with the semantics of etymologised Northern Russian lexemes. (These derivatives either have not survived or are not recorded in the modern word family). The author explains the logic of the emergence of all the word meanings considered. In addition to semantic organisation, the author considers the structural organisation of the supposed loanwords studying the possibilities of the formal aspect of the word-formation process in the donor language and the possibilities of word-formation adaptation in Russian. Besides, the article considers phonetic adaptation describing possible reasons for the discrepancy in the position of vowels in the etymon and in loanword порочка . The author assumes that this can be explained by the early nature of borrowing (prior to the е > ’о shift in Old Russian). At the same time, the author concedes that lexemes with a back vowel in the source language may also exist.