ON SOME NAMES OF TREES IN WRITTEN MONUMENTS OF THE UDMURT LANGUAGE OF THE 18th CENTURY

Abstract

In the proposed article, the author refers to some names of trees and shrubs, recorded in the written monuments of the Udmurt language of the 18th century. The forest with all the trees, shrubs and various herbs growing in it has always had and still has invaluable ecological, economic and social significance in human life. The realities of the plant world often belong to the oldest layers of the vocabulary of any language and always arouse the genuine interest of researchers, since their names, which fix the process of knowing and mastering the world of flora, reveal characteristic features of the national mentality. The purpose of this study is to identify the history of written fixation, etymology and ethnocultural features of the Udmurt names of some trees and shrubs: бадь [bad'] ‘willow’, бадяр [bad'ar] ‘maple’, беризь [beriz'] ‘linden’, гузэмпу [guzempu] ‘honeysuckle’ and лемышпу [l'em2špu] ‘cherry’, each of which in one form or another is reflected in the monuments of early Udmurt writing. To achieve the task, an empirical approach, methods and techniques of comparative historical and comparative linguistics were applied. The names of the phytonyms under consideration, found in written documents of the 18th century, are correlated with the names from later sources in the Udmurt language, if necessary, parallels are given from related and unrelated, and in some cases, contacting languages. The etymological analysis made it possible to identify the original names of the analyzed trees and shrubs that arose in the Ural ( бадь ‘willow’, бадяр ‘maple’) and Finno-Permian ( гузэмпу ‘honeysuckle’) epochs, as well as borrowed lexemes from the Tatar ( беризь ‘linden’) and Iranian ( лемышпу ‘cherry’) languages.