Etymology and semantic development of the dialect word uros ‘trouble, misfortune’ in connection with traditional Komi-Permyak beliefs about death

The article analyzes the etymology and semantics of the word uros in the dialects of the Perm region. Used over a large territory of the Russian language, mainly in the Russian North and in dialects genetically related to this area, the lexeme uros has the meanings: ‘stubbornness, temper (about a person, animal)’, ‘about a stubborn, capricious person’, ‘about a stubborn horse’, ‘about a touchy person’, ‘a lazy person’, and only in a limited area does it mean ‘the evil eye, a bad spell’ and ‘failure, an unfavorable turn in business or trade’. In the Russian dialects of the Komi-Permyak district, this word is used in specific narratives about the harbingers of death, where it takes on the meaning of ‘trouble, misfortune’, ‘a harbinger of trouble, misfortune’, ‘a supernatural phenomenon’. The semantic transition uros ‘a capricious, crying child’ > ‘whims, crying of a child as a consequence of a bad spell, the evil eye’ > ‘a bad spell, the evil eye’ looks obvious, while the connection between the meanings uros ‘a crying, capricious child’ and uros ‘trouble, misfortune’ is not entirely explainable on the basis of Russian dialects. This semantic transition may have occurred due to the fact that the Russian word uros was borrowed into dialects of the Komi-Zyryan and Komi- Permyak languages, where it began to mean a ghost soul, a double of a person appearing before his death (ort, urös/ures, dushenka). Apparently, the Russian dialect word uros acquired the meanings ‘trouble, misfortune’, ‘a harbinger of death’, ‘a supernatural phenomenon’ in the zone of Komi-Russian contacts, and this group of meanings is associated with the traditional ideas of the Finno-Ugric Komi people that before the death of a person his loved ones are shown the soul ort, a ghost that can appear in the form of a double, in an ornithomorphic and zoomorphic form, and can also manifest itself in other supernatural phenomena.