A. N. Rakin (Syktyvkar, Russia). Hydro-landscape vocabulary of the Udmurt language

Anatoly N. Rakin,
Doctor of Philology, Senior Research Fellow,
Institute of Language, Literature and History, Komi Research Centre,
Ural Branch, Russian Academy of Science
(Syktyvkar, Russia), anatolij.rakin@mail.ru

Introduction. Landscape vocabulary refers to the basic vocabulary of any natural language. It nominates both natural geographical and anthropogenic objects that have arisen as a result of human activity. In accordance with the substantial signs (water, land) as part of the landscape vocabulary, it is possible to distinguish two macrosystems, namely hydro-landscape vocabulary and the vocabulary of the land. Each of these components has its own internal structure, which differ from each other both by composition and quantitative indicators.
Materials and Methods. The subject of linguistic analysis in the article is the hydro-landscape vocabulary of the Udmurt language (239 items), which does not refer to the category of proper nouns. These are nominal words that can find in the dictionaries of general vocabulary. The paper employed comparative, historical, synchronously comparative, descriptive and statistical research methods.
Results and Discussion. Based on the subject-conceptual content of nominative units, two categories of hydronyms are distinguished and considered in the work. One of them is system-forming or dominant; it represents the designations of the main types of water bodies in a given territory. The second group is concentrated around the dominant units and acts in relation to them as intrasystem formations. The basis of hydro-landscape vocabulary of the Udmurt language are of primordial origin. Ancient layer of nominative units, consisting of proto-Uralic, proto-Finno-Ugrian, proto-Finno-Permian and proto-Permian words, has genetic correspondence in the Permian, and in the majority of modern Finno-Ugric languages. Later units appeared in the period of independent existence of the language, after its divergence with the closely related Komi-Zyryan and Komi-Permian languages. The beginning of the formation of a foreign-language component refers to the common-Permian epoch, most of the non-original names are late borrowings that penetrated from the Russian and Turkic languages. Other types of borrowings (Baltic-Finnish, Ob-Ugrian, Samoyed) are not available here.
Conclusion. The formation and development of the hydro-landscape vocabulary of the Udmurt language took place for many millennia on the basis of internal resources. Ancient Iranian, Turkic and Russian languages served as external sources of its replenishment.

Key words: the Udmurt language; vocabulary; hydro-landscape items; original fund, borrowings.

For citation: Rakin AN. Hydro-landscape vocabulary of the Udmurt language. Finno-ugorskii mir = Finno-Ugric World. 2019; 11; 3: 268–276. (In Russian)