Tomsk Old Believers' dictionary'' project (based on everyday life texts of old believers' community)

At present when dialectic differences gradually become extinct the study of everyday life speech of the book legacy of old believers is an important and promising task as they have preserved the elements of old culture of writing and regional national dialects in their ''isolated'' community. The arising interest of linguists to the given problem has recently lead to the formation of a new scientific field - ethnic-confessional linguistics. S.E. Nikitina defined the task of this field as studying both traditional linguistic tasks such as revealing the dialectic composition of old believers' communities and places of their exodus and the comparatively new ones such as revealing linguistic stereotypes of the religious sphere. That is why collecting, processing and publishing old believers' manuscripts as well as composing various dictionaries on their basis is of special importance. A collection of old believers' manuscripts including not only official and cheti but also domestic and practical texts on paper and birchbark was formed during the expeditions to the North of Tomsk Region in 1980-1990s. The biggest manuscripts were diaries: the so called ''island chronicler'' (19561975, 14 sheets, birchbark) and ''Easter book'' (1956-1975, 14 sheets, birchbark). The first one written by a man presents everyday life texts about weather and domestic chores of the commoners for the period of 8 years while the second one written by a woman describes only the festive week with some additions about the important events of the previous year. The scriptures speech is vivid and metaphorical. Graphics, lexical units and grammatical forms are archaic based on church-bookish style. The nominative composition is interesting and diversified. The author has started to work on lexicographic processing of the given unique old believers' material. The article presents the examples of three variants of dictionaries. The first one is a dialectic dictionary of differential type. This dictionary presents non-equivalent ethnographic lexicon (кулемка, хиуз), lexical dialectisms (баской), formal (облак, овторник) and semantical variants of Russian words (остров). The second type of dictionaries describes only purely confessionally important vocabulary and phraseology (сестрица, отче, мясопуст, получить смерть) including church Slavisms (глаголить, десница), the names of orthodox celebrations, etc., which require encyclopedic explanation. The third type is a full dictionary of Tomsk chronicler made according to the cluster principle, i.e. all the words of a definite root found in the manuscript are included in one article: мороз, немороз, морозик, морозить, заморозить, заморозка, etc. Each type has its own source-knowing capabilities.

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