Nomination of lower mythology characters in the Turkic and Slavic language consciousness: semantic and cultural aspects

The names of the characters of the lower mythology in Russian and Tatar are compared: their phonetic design and semantic content. In heterogeneous languages there are lexemes that denote a creature living at the expense of the physical forces of people (drinking their blood), sending diseases that can subdue people’s will (vampire, ghoul). The analysis of the linguistic material is based on the data of the explanatory and etymological dictionaries of the Russian and Tatar languages, as well as the information of reference books on mythology. Methodologically, the study is based upon the principles of the research approach, according to which a linguistic sign is viewed in the unity of its structure and content as an object of an integral system that includes this sign into its space and creates conditions for the representation of its specificity and laws. The main method is the method of identifying linguistic units functioning at different times, and units of different languages with the same meaning; private methods - methods of word-formation analysis and semantic description - are also used. As an illustrative material, the records made during folklore and dialectological expeditions (2014-2016) in the rural settlements of Tyumen Oblast are used. The academic novelty of the research consists in attracting the field material demonstrated for the first time, in the presentation of a detailed analysis of the polysemantic structure of dialect units (words and phraseology). The observations allowed the authors to draw a conclusion about the phonetic connection between the words vampir [vampire] and upyr’ [ghoul] and their common constituents in the semantic sense. In this case, the results of the mutual influence of different peoples, their common ethical evaluation of phenomena with significant social and cultural differences were significant. However, in each language (dvoedushnik [double soul] in the Slavic mythology), along with similar components of the mythological image, there are unique ones. Thus, among the Turkic mythological characters there is an image of the harmful spirit metskey, whose uniqueness is in the fact that, according to popular beliefs, one can become it in life, while ghouls (ubyri) usually represent the characters of the world of the dead. It is connected with the functioning and distribution of mythonyms in different geocultural areas, with the peculiarities of the mentality of particular peoples, with their value priorities. On the one hand, the study allows the authors to state that, in general, the formation of the meanings of mythonyms and lexemes of secondary nomination in different languages are similar; on the other hand, the results of the research reveal the specific features of the formation of secondary nomination, allowing to reconstruct a fragment of the ancient national language picture of the world, which, in its turn, helps solve one of the urgent problems of modern linguistic semantics.

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