Christian terminology in the context of Vepsian linguistics:Vepsian vs Russian (linguogeographical and etymological aspects)

The article deals with important terms from the point of view of spiritual culture with the terms "God" and "pray" in the Vepsian language. The language of the small Vepsian people belongs to the Baltic-Finnish branch of the Uralic language family. The purpose of the article is to present the culturological background associated with Bible translations into the language of the Veps, analysis of the Vepses naming of the named concepts in the etymological and linguogeographical aspects. The concept of "God" is denoted by the Veps by the lexemes Jumal and Sund. The article attempts to clarify the difference in the semantics of these lexemes based on the material of the Vepsian language and to bring arguments of a philological, mythological, and linguistic nature in the interpretation of these terms. The term "pray" in the dialects of the Vepsian language is given by the lexemes loita, mol'das, risttas, the last of which (mol 'das, risttas) are Russian borrowings, semantically mastered and adapted by the Vepsain languages, indicating the interaction of languages in this area of spiritual culture. The linguistic maps illustrate the dialect distribution of the analyzed terms. In the Vepsian naming of the two most important concepts from the Christian point of view, analyzed in this article, on the one hand, one can observe his own ancestral heritage, which was previously mythological, but which eventually acquired a purely Christian character, preserved in the Vepsian language. On the other hand, in this lexicon, contacts of the Russian and Vepsian Orthodox cultures were manifested, which were reflected in all the dialects of the Vepsian language, which, however, under the pressure of the contacting language, nevertheless, did not let the native original vocabulary of the analyzed thematic class die out.

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