Children's illness “shchetinka” in Karelian language and culture

It was revealed that the folk medicine of Karelian village population is poorly studied. Multiple fragmented data on various ways of treating people can hardly reflect a full picture of the variety and richness of this segment of Karelian culture. The purpose of this article is to study the children's illness “shchetinka” using an ethnolinguistic approach. In order to research the subject in focus it is necessary; first, to present the lexical richness of Karelian language concerning a lexeme “shchetinka” and to define the origin of all collected names; secondly, to analyze local beliefs explaining the reasons of “shchetinka”s emergence; thirdly, to reveal the ways of doctoring this children's disease. All collected lexical and ethnographic material is studied with consideration of other languages closely related to Karelian language and different nations living with Karelians on the same territory for a long time. The relevance of this research is defined by the first attempt of the research aimed at the analysis of the disease in focus. The study is based on the lexical and ethnographic approach. Both the earlier published documents and multiple field materials collected by the author in the regions of the Republic of Karelia were used to carry out a research, as a result, new data were introduced into the scientific circulation.