On the Study of Nonstandard Mineral Vocabulary: the Names of Crystals

The article discusses nonstandard gemstone names – the names of precious stones that do not belong to the official international mineralogical terminology. In Russian linguistics, this lexical group remains understudied. The paper reflects on the ideographic specifics of nonstandard gemstone names. It deals with the names of crystals used in the Middle Urals – in dialectal speech as well as in the language of stonecutters, gemstone hunters, and amateur minerologists. This territory was chosen for the research as it has a rich tradition of mineral recovery and carving. The lexical units analyzed in the article denote crystal minerals. A large part of the names was collected in expeditions with the author’s participation. The article attempts to create an ideographic classification of the names of crystals. The whole array of the lexical material was divided into 7 basic thematic groups: “Color characteristics of crystals,” “Specifics of crystal growth and formation types,” “Crystal inclusions,” “Crystal size,” “The parts of crystals,” “Processes inside crystals”, “Characterization of the quality and preciousness of crystals.” For some lexemes, the author comments on their semantics, motivation, grammatical and sometimes ethnolinguistic and sociolinguistic features. The research determines the rate of occurrence (based on the number of lexemes used within a particular group) for each thematic group and analyzes the reasons for differences in the rate.