Research of traditional Mordovian medicine based on field trips: linguo-cultural aspect

Introduction. The article considers the work of national and foreign scholars. It analyses the linguistic representation of all layers of cultural concepts of traditional medicine of Mordovians based on the data collected during research expeditions in diachrony and synchrony from the point of view of ethnolinguistics, onomasiology, sociolinguistics and cognitive semantics. The purpose of the article is to consider traditional medicine of Mordva in the linguocultural aspect. The object of the study is the cultural concepts of folk medicine of Mordovians. The main points of the article can be used for such courses as “History of Mordovian culture”, “Culture of Finno-Ugric peoples”. Materials and Methods. The article employs the methods of field ethnography (direct observation, immersion in culture, experiment, interview, conversation, description, classification). The empirical data of the study was collected during the expedition to the places of compact residence of the ethnic groups of Mordovians of Moksha, Erzya, and Shoksha (2013-2016); dictionaries, works of oral-poetic creativity of the Mordovian people, etc. Results and Discussion. Traditional medicine of Mordva has always been in the center of attention of scholars: ethnographers, historians, folklorists, sociologists, however, in the linguocultural aspect has not been properly considered before. We conducted linguocultural interpretation of audiovisual sources (more than 3,500), questionnaires (243), names of diseases (124) and herbs used in medicine (148), spells from diseases (57), metaphors, polysemias in the names of diseases made it possible to identify ways of translating traditional culture in the content of methods of people's treatment. The study makes it possible to outline further directions in the development of theoretical positions in the field of linguoculturology of the Mordovian ethnos. Conclusion. Traditional Mordva medicine is part of traditional culture and an important element of traditional health-saving practice. The results of the analysis of lexicographical and text materials explicating the content of concepts in the Mordovian languages testify the cultural marking and information capacity of the lexical, semantic, phraseological, associative means of the language as well as they allow to identify the main cultural concepts in folk medicine of Mordovians.