Oikonyms of Karelia as an Object for Lexicographic Description: An Experience of Working on the Dictionary of Ludic Karelian Settlement Names

The article describes the main parameters of oikonymic material representation in the regional dictionary dedicated to the settlement naming system of one of the three Karelian ethnic subgroups - Ludic Karelians. The lexicographic description of Karelia’s oikonyms faces the following key challenges: their co-existence in two languages, involving two levels of their nomination - official and unofficial; administrative affiliations of a substantial corpus of settlement names that are now classified as “former”; accentuation issues caused both by the impossibility to place stress in some Russian-language oikonyms in the absence of relevant data on vanished settlements or due to stress adjustment in the names adopted into the Russian place naming system from Karelian. With field material as one of the sources, it became possible, in addition to the corpus of Russian-language oikonyms used as title words, to also provide a listing of unofficial (vernacular) variants functioning orally in Karelian. For instance, the Russian name of the village Nyukhovo (historically Nyukhkievo) descends from a byname-type anthroponym (cf. Karelian nyhkea ‘to grunt, to groan, to moan’ or Vepsian n uhkta ‘to whimper, to snivel’, n’uhkota ‘to sulk, to be angry’), preserving the memory of the settlement’s founder, whereas the Karelian unofficial oikonym Ylici reflects the position of the village on the Lake Dolgoye shore opposite from the volost center (cf. Karelian ylici ‘situated across, behind sth’). Where possible, the historical-etymological part of the dictionary entries contains information on both Russian and Karelian names. To link the oikonyms to the administrative units system, the republic’s 1926 administrative grid was taken, which offers the most complete coverage of settlements in Karelia that vanished over the 20th century (a table for correspondence between 1926 and 2021 administrative divisions was appended). Accentuation issues arise only in the Russian-language corpus of the oikonyms (since stress in Karelian is always on the first syllable), in the names incorporated into the Russian toponymic system through direct assimilation or calquing of Karelian source names. In some names, the stress remained on the first syllable (Vlg. Kenyaki/Ken ’akko from Ludic ken ’akko ‘high sandy mound’), while in others it shifted over time (Vlg. Matkachi/ Matkaccu from Finnic matka, matk ‘road, way, distance, isthmus’). The suggested dictionary entry structure makes it possible to both show the entire corpus of settlement names and their uses in the bilingual neighborhood (due to involvement of a large amount of historical sources from the 16th-19th cc.), as well as the history of the study of individual oikonyms, and to trace the evolution history of the region’s overall oikonymic system through stages in place-name formation.