To tell fortunes and to conjure: some lexemes with magical meaning in Veps dialects (semantic, etymological and linguo-geographical aspects)

The article addresses the Veps words describing magical actions with the meaning “to guess, to conjure”, as well as the names for people who perform these actions - “sorcerer, fortune-teller, conjurer”. The aim of the study is to identify the semantic, etymological and linguo-geographical features of the analyzed vocabulary. Such analysis is of particular importance, since it refers to the elements of the spiritual culture of the Veps people. The conducted semantic and etymological analysis shows that the meaning of the studied Veps concepts coincides with the corresponding concepts of the closely related peoples. From the etymological point of view, the studied vocabulary carries the imprint of the Proto-Baltic-Finnish times, since corresponding words are also found in related languages (arboida, noid, tedai). Some of the words from the analyzed semantic group were borrowed from the dialects of the Russian language, which indicates the mutual influence and close connection between these languages (gadaida, koudun). It is pointed out that some words, for example, babu (‘bean') and boba ~ bobaine, could have passed through two stages of borrowing, as evidenced by the analyzed verb bobita (‘to tell fortunes reading beans') related to both abovementioned lexemes.