On the origin of some Russian Siberian words from the sphere of material culture. II. Water transport: «сойма», «буса», «камья» («комяга», «комляга», «коняги»), «барка», «халка»

The paper continues the earlier series of publications devoted to the origin and history of Russian, especially Russian-Siberian, designations of ships (sea and river) and boats. The interest aroused by this group of words consists primarily in the fact that they represent the objects of material culture that played a very significant role in the Russian colonization of vast areas of the North and Siberia and outstanding geographical discoveries. In the first paper, the terms коч , бат , and ветка were examined. The present publication deals with the old Russian and dialectal words сойма , буса , and камья (and variants), барка and халка . Not only the origin of words is considered but also the other aspects of their history and geography. The term cойма ( soyma ) ‘a kind of a ship’ does not seem to have been attested in the sources of the Russian language in Siberia. However, it did exist in the interval between the late 16th and 18th centuries in Siberia (Mangaseya), as evidenced by the report of the Englishman V. Pursglove in 1611. It is an example of the North Russian word, used once in Siberia, but subsequently not established there. The lexicon of Russian pioneers and early Russian inhabitants of Siberia included many words which for various reasons were not established beyond the Urals and left no traces of their existence either in the monuments of writing or dialects. Such words should be reflected in the historical dictionaries of the Russian-Siberian vocabulary. Буса ‘a kind of a ship’ was known in the Middle Ages from Venice to Iceland. It was borrowed from Germanic languages into Russian, most likely in the Baltic Northwest. From Novgorod, the word was assimilated by Moscow, and in the Moscow epoch, especially intensively in the 16th-17th centuries, it was carried to the Volga, the Caspian Sea, and Siberia regions. To explain the dialecticisms камья , комяга , комляга , коняги ‘a kind of a boat, of a ship’ the variants коняги , коняга reflecting the relic of the phonetics of the Old Norse dialect, are of crucial importance, namely, the development of мл ’ > н ’ as in the case of крень - кремль , на зени - на земли etc. One of the lexical relics of the North Russian colonization, a continuation of the Novgorod colonization, can be seen in the word барк ‘a kind of a ship’, which was witnessed in Siberia in the 17th century with the meaning ‘river cargo ship’. The word халка ‘a barge’ is a good example (one of quite numerous) of the situation when Russian words borrowed from the languages of Siberia are connected to the ancient lexical relations between these languages (lexical isoglosses, borrowings).

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