Nominations of the Speech Process of Finnic Origin in the Russian Dialects of Karelia (Structural Aspect)

Abstract

This article analyses dialect lexemes recorded in the Russian dialects of Karelia, which genetically go back to the Finnic lexical fund and represent a fragment of the semantic field “A speaking person”. The purpose of the article is to describe the features of the adaptation of loanwords and the peculiarities of their functioning in Russian dialects at the formal-grammatical level. Such an analysis of a genetically and semantically related group of words borrowed into dialects has never been carried out previously. The author focuses on verbal nominations denoting the speaking process and derivatives from them referring to Russian dialect and etymological dictionaries and dialectological and etymological research as a source base. For comparison, the author uses data from dictionaries of the Karelian, Vepsian, and Finnish languages. The analysis of words reveals a high variability of the material due to the adaptation of genetically different morphemes. As a foreign word entered the system of the receiving language, the root morpheme carried the main load, and to adapt it, the language used a Slavic word-formation element. The correlation of the derived nominations demonstrates that there are certain lacunae in the fixation of materials due to the peculiarities of data collection. In some cases, missing lexemes can be reconstructed according to well-known grammatical and most popular and active word-formation models in the Russian language. Also, the author puts forward a hypothesis about the time of possible occurrence of such words in the system of dialects. Russian studies of the features of formal and grammatical adaptation of the nominations of the speech process prove that loanwords first became a fact of the lexical system of the Russian language in the border territories of interaction between Russians and Veps and Karelians, and then they were introduced into the speech of Russian-speaking residents of Karelia in a wider space. The latter is confirmed by the geography of the existence of the studied lexemes related to the Russian dialects of Karelia and adjacent regions. The author pays special attention to bright indicators of borrowing at the grammatical and morphemic levels — the verbs ending in -андать/-айдать.