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Abstract
The undertaken research replenishes the pool of knowledge about folklore texts and the functions of spellonyms as signs saturated with national and cultural meanings. The study establishes and compares linguistic and cultural characteristics of spellonyms in the onomasticon of Australian and Nanaian aetiological tales. The authors proposed a typology of spellonyms which includes 5 thematic groups: nominations of deities of different nature; nominations of celestial bodies transformed from representatives of the tribe; nominations of objects of worship and magical rituals; nominations of magical natural phenomena; nominations of magical creatures. The results of the research demonstrate a significant prevalence in the number of deity nominations among Australian spellonyms, while the majority of Nanaian spellonyms refer to magical artefacts. The research has also proved the utmost significance of the water element in the folk worldview of Australian Aborigines and the equivalent importance of the water, land and air elements in the Nanai folk worldview. The obvious preference in both folklore traditions is given to nominations of native origin transcribed into the language of translation. The structural types of spellonyms vary from group to group, with the majority of monolexemic nominations.
Highlights
Folklore works are closely related to national and regional traditions of a society, embody values and worldview of their creators, and act as a driving force for creativity and innovation
The study material is represented by the corpus of texts in English (58 folktales included in the collections “Australian Legendary Tales” [5] and “More Australian Legendary Tales” [6]) and the corpus of texts in Russian (65 folktales included in the folktale collection “The Nanai folklore: Ningman, Siokhor, Telungu” [12])
The indigenous religion of Australian is characterized by the presence of gods, whose images are often depicted in some tangible, recognizable form
Summary
Folklore works are closely related to national and regional traditions of a society, embody values and worldview of their creators, and act as a driving force for creativity and innovation. The undertaken study deals with a rich and diverse folklore heritage of ethnic groups whose social and historical background appears to be similar in many ways. Both Australian aborigines and Nanaians had a primitive communal system, their economy being based on fishing and hunting. The Amur-Ussuri parallels might establish a link between Alaskan texts and texts recorded in Borneo, Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula [1]
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