Russian Rural Place Names and Features of Their Derivational Structure (Based on the Toponymy of East Kazakhstan)

Abstract

The paper studies official Russian names of rural settlements (comonyms) of the East Kazakhstan region based on toponymic material of three districts: Beskaragai, Borodulikha, and Shemonaikha. The choice of these areas is due to the high proportion of the Russian population and, consequently, Russian place names in the local name system. The author identifies three main toponymic layers: Turkic, Slavic, and German. The latter one offers an insight into the general dynamics of the local toponymic system and some of its historically and politically motivated features. Partial Russification of a number of Turkic place names shows the interaction of subsystems. However, the main attention is paid to the comonyms of Russian origin focusing on their systemic connections, motivation, internal form, and derivational structure. The Slavic substrate allows the authors to illustrate that intralinguistic tendencies and extralinguistic factors create “points of tension” within the toponymic strata that are resolved in one way or another. For example, the current system of rural place names shows a growing tendency for independence and self-sufficiency: the names related to productive and regular word-formation patterns, having close ties in the language and a clear internal form (such as Vladimirovka, Dmitrievka, Ivanovka, Kondratievka, Novopokrovka), become semantically “independent” when used in speech. These are instantly recognized as comonyms by linguistic features even without adding a geographic term (village). It is further planned that the collected material will form the basis of a dictionary of geographical names of the East Kazakhstan region.