On semantic and motivational reconstruction of north Russian names of meat dishes

The article deals with North Russian dialect names of meat dishes. The work examines the lexical and ethnographic data presented in card indexes and dictionaries of the Arkhangelsk, Vologda and Kostroma regions, including unpublished materials from card indexes of the Toponymic expedition of the Ural Federal University. The study is carried out within ethnolinguistics and aims to identify the cultural and linguistic features of the names of meat dishes. The theoretical significance of the work consists in that it develops a comprehensive ethnolinguistic approach to the analysis of the lexical group based on the methods of semantic-motivational, onomasiological, and etymological analysis. These methods allow us to characterize the territorial variants of the names of meat products, their genus-species differentiation, origin and motivational ties with other groups of vocabulary. It has been revealed that most of the names of meat dishes have a transparent internal form and duplicate the designations of the corresponding parts of the animal. The names of meat dishes (not from offal) reflect the traditional technology of cooking as well as the peculiarities of consuming the dishes. The following semantic and motivational models are distinguished: ‘internal organ' ‘dish from it', ‘something that has frozen; something cold' ‘aspic, jelly', ‘something that shakes' ‘aspic, jelly', ‘being old' ‘prepared for future consumption (about meat)', ‘thin flat cake' ‘jerked beef. There is proposed motivational reconstruction for the dialect words артиль , жулей , путаник . Basing on the analysis of the words, the author has identified the composition of meat diet, the types of dishes, the features of cooking those, the role of meat in festive and everyday meals as well as the regulations that determine consumption of meat. The presence of meat dishes in the diet served as a socio-ethnic marker: consumption of bones and offal was considered a sign of poverty, while consumption of meat - a sign of wealth; meat dishes were mainly prepared by peasants on holidays; eating raw meat or blood, as well as meat ‘with a bad smell', was attributed to the local Russian or other ethnic groups, etc.