Slavic Feminative Suffixes in Linguistic Geography Presentation

Abstract

The article deals with the linguistic geography analysis of the words meaning women and female animals containing the suffixes *-ica, *-ъka/*-ьka, *-ixa and *-ynja /*-inja on the material of “Slavic Linguistic Atlas”. The research object are schematic maps compiled on the base of its seven volumes of lexical and word-formation series. On each of them the main localization of the forms with one of the affixes in both meanings is given. As a result of their analysis the conclusions about the degree of area matching of words in both meanings is made. It appears that the areas of the highest concentration of the suffixes in both lexical groups in most cases match only partly. Its main part is located in different Slavic languages. The most clear examples of such spatial differentiation are the following: the low frequency of woman designations with the suffix *-ica in Polish and Czech along with quite numerous fixations of female animal names with the same formant. On the contrary, in the Slovak language the forms with *-ica meaning “woman” strongly prevail over female animal names. Whereas, in contrast, the suffix *-ъka/*-ьka in Polish and Czech mostly appears in woman nominations but Slovak largely has it in female animal names as well. It is noteworthy that there is a difference in the suffix *-ica functioning between the Serbian East Shtokavian dialects and Macedonian language on the one hand and Bulgarian on another hand: in the first pair it is mainly used in woman designations in contrast to female animal names in Bulgarian. Although this South Slavic area is united by the high frequency of the suffix *-ъka/*-ьka in both lexical groups. This feature opposes it to Croatian and West Shtokavian dialects of Serbian. The same formant determines word-formation differentiation of the East Slavic languages: Ukrainian differs from Belarusian and Russian by high concentration of words with the suffix *-ъka/*-ьka.