Attributes ruma and tuhmu/tuhma as nominations of an ugly person in the Karelian language

The study addresses the issue of the origin, semantics, and functioning of the polysemantic attributes ruma and tuhmu / tuhma, which nominate an ugly person in the Karelian language. In total, in the dialects of the Karelian language there are about 80 dialectisms denoting this image. The names in question are quite widely represented in the Karelians’ linguistic picture of the world through phraseological units, proverbs, and ditties. The novelty of the study lies in the lack of research into this vocabulary using the material of the Karelian language. The relevance of the study is determined by the intensification of conceptual studies over the past two decades, as well as the special attention of linguists to the class of discursive words that organize communication and saturate the text with subjective-evaluative, persuasive-modal, and pragmatic means. The ethnolinguistic, semantic-motivational, and comparative methods were used for the analysis. The theoretical and methodological basis of the study was comprised of the works of foreign and Russian scholars in the field of linguistics and folklore. Dialect and phraseological dictionaries of the Karelian language were used as the sources for collecting language material for the analysis. The findings of the study suggest that the attributes ruma and tuhmu / tuhma are characterized by a wide range of distribution of the dialect forms of these lemmas, their word-formation productivity, and usage for the formation of idioms, and are also represented in the Karelian linguistic picture of the world.