The paper reviews the “Dictionary of Place Names of the Republic of Kalmykia” compiled by scientists of the Kalmyk State University and published in 2019. It is primarily focused on toponyms ...collected during the expeditions of 2013–2017 but also includes the names extracted from other sources (maps, works of Kalmyk writers, scientific works). The book comprises more than 2,400 entries and today is the most complete bilingual (Russian and Kalmyk) on the toponymy of the Republic. The etymologies provided for the majority of names make the dictionary a rich source of information about the material and spiritual culture of the Kalmyks and their vision of the surrounding geographical space. The toponymy recorded in the dictionary builds a larger picture of Kalmyk generic sub-ethnonyms and personal names corpus, including archaic ones. In this vein, apart from discussing the “formal” features of the dictionary, the review analyzes the culturally significant layers of Kalmyk toponyms presented there (names of steppe burial mounds, water bodies, sacred places, etc.). Considering the prospects of making a new, even more complete version of the dictionary, the reviewer gives her recommendations on advancing the etymological research and the improvement of the reference part of this edition.
The article is devoted to a comprehensive study of the toponymic area of the Moksha-Mordovian Blagodarovka village of the Borsky district of the Samara region. The aim of the article is an ...introduction into scientific discourse and the etymological analysis of toponymic vocabulary of the Blagodarovka village and its outskirts. The methods of the article are based on the principles of toponymic researches formulated in the works of leading Russian onomasticians. The article is based on the author's experience. As a result of the researches, the main characteristics and dialect belonging of the Blagodarovsky dialect of the Moksha-Mordovian language were determined, the geographical terminology existing in it was fixed, and the toponymic vocabulary was collected and analyzed. It is concluded that Blagodarovsky dialect of the Moksha-Mordovian language, despite a relatively short period of existence in the Russian environment with separation from other Mordovian language areas, is one of the most Russified Mordovian dialects of the Samara Volga region. A number of geographical names of the toponymic area of Blagodarovka find identical or close parallels in most other Moksha-Mordovian and Erzya-Mordovian toponymic areas of the region. The natural and geographical settlement conditions of native Blagodarovsky dialect speakers of the Moksha-Mordovian language as in the case of other Mordovian dialects of the Samara Volga region had a significant impact on the composition and semantics of the geographical terminology that exists in it.
The article deals with the toponymy of the Karelian village of Kolvitsa on the Kola Peninsula which territorially belonged to Karelia until May 1938 and then became a part of the Murmansk region. The ...study is based on historical documents and present-day data obtained in the course of the author’s fieldwork in Kolvitsa in the summer of 2017 and 2018. It focuses on drawing correlations between the known historical facts about Kolvitsa with toponymic data which validates and expands the amount of historical evidence, making it possible to reconstruct many features of the life of the village in the past. The analysis begins with a number of Russian toponyms that existed even before Kolvitsa was reclaimed by Karelians (Kandalaksha, Kolvitskaya Bay, Poryaguba, etc.). Most of these names are of Sami origin and, as shown by the author, have undergone several stages of adaptation including the transition from Sami to Russian, then from Russian to Karelian and then in many cases from Karelian back to Russian, due to the Russifi cation of the village population in the middle of the 20th century. Further, the Karelian layer of toponymy is considered in detail, which been preserved quite well. The author pays particular attention to a large group of names with stems indicating a person: derived from personal names (Annin/oja ‘Anna’s Stream,’ Kusmal’an/ talo ‘Kuzma’s House’, etc.), ethnic names (Lapin/niemi ‘Lopar Cape’, Ryssän/niemi ‘Russian Cape’), and some appellatives. Another focus of the study is constituted by the geographical terms in the toponymy of the village. Their analysis, aimed at historical reconstruction, allows us to assert that the Karelian population of Kolvitsa was made of immigrants from the Olangsky volost and from the former residents of Voknavolok, Kestenga, Tikhtozero, Ukhta.
In the framework of the commemorations for the First World War, a research project has been carried on in order to identify, archive and disseminate the places involved by the war along the Italian ...front. A task of this project foresaw the analysis of the terminological component of toponyms. All the occurrences of place names has been collected, evaluated and organised in order to fulfill the task of associate univocally one place name to a set of geographic coordinates, thus creating a specific geodatabase. Lexical, formal, linguistic and dialectal variants, homonyms, exonyms and even errors, once processed, lead to an unambiguous perspective on the use of toponyms during the war and their subsequent variations over the years.
The cultural identity of each of the larger islands that make up the Balearic archipelago is shown through the local geographical terminology and toponymy, which are results of the successive ...overlapping of languages and cultures brought to the islands by various peoples throughout history. By classifying and analyzing the toponymy and geographical terminology of the Balearic Islands, unique particularities can be found. There are differences between each of the islands, as well as with non-island territory, as a result of centuries of isolation. This same isolation has also led to the preservation of terminology and other linguistic aspects, and has created an endemic culture. The results of the records of terminology that contribute to the geographical and cultural characterization of the Balearic Islands are presented along with some keys to understanding the islands' idiosyncrasies.
The paper deals with Russian geographical terms in the Karelian dialects of Tver Region and is mainly based on field materials collected by the author in the 2000s. The author argues that the main ...corpus of geographical terms and place names of the studied area is of Karelian origin and correlates with geographical terminology and toponymy of other groups of the Karelian population that migrated in the past from the north-eastern Lake Onega Region. At the same time, as distinct from other areas of settlement of the Karelian population, the dialects of Tver Karelians are rich in loan words from the Russian language which appeared in different periods: a part of them represent traditional geographical terms of the Russian population of Tver Region, while others seem to be relatively recent innovations, mainly of the Soviet period. According to the data provided by the author, approximately 40 % of current geographical terms of the Karelian dialects of Tver region are of Russian origin. This proportion can be explained by the specificity of the landscape of the studied territory which differs from the landscape of the original Karelian areas, as well as by Tver Karelians' long habitation in the Central Russian Historical Zone which made permanent contacts with the Russian population inevitable.
In the Slovenian toponyms Rítoznoj and Ritoznoje, as well as in the Serbian R``itopek, Slavic deverbal compounds *r˝ito-znojь/-znoje and *r˝ito-pekъ have been preserved. They originate from the ...syntactic constructions *(kъde sъlnьce) *znojítъ/ pečètъ (vъ) r˝itь (gory/vъzpętiny) ‘(where the sun) blazes down on the back side (of the mountain/hill)’. These compounds have been used to denote – like the synonymous compound *čelopekъ – besides the sunny side of the locality (*-znojъ/-pekъ) in their first part *rito- ‘the rear side’/*čelo- ‘the front side’ also the direction from which the sun blazed down with regard to the topographic object, i.e. the mountain/hill as a whole. Both compounds can therefore testify to an even earlier settlement of the areas to the west of the contemporary settlements of Rítoznoj, Ritoznoje, R``itopek, and to the east of the contemporary settlements of SSlav. *Čelopekъ.
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