Kolotoe kopyto: on the semantic and motivational reconstruction of a northern Russian dialectal nomination

The article discusses the origin of the Northern Russian dialectal nomination kolotoe kopyto (“broken hoof”), meaning a “married woman or dishonored girl”, as recorded in the Olonets dialects of the late XIX century by the local historian and ethnographer G. I. Kulikovsky. The conducted research confi rms that this designation fi ts into the all-Slavic tradition and complements a number of names such as bityj gorshok (“broken pot”), roznaya posudina (“leaking tub”), etc., whose internal forms refl ect the idea of a woman who lost her virginity as a broken vessel, which is symbolically expressed in the ritual of breaking pots within the action code of wedding ceremony. In addition to an obvious metaphor derived from the direct meaning of the word kopyto (“hoof”), the article presents a motivational model for this component based on the dialectal use of this lexeme in the Russian North as the name of a married woman’s headdress. The hypothesis put forward is confi rmed by typical nominations used during wedding rituals, which focus on corresponding images (venchannye (“crowned”), besshamshurnaya (“without a headdress”), pustovoloska (“bareheaded”), pokrytka (“covered”)), as well as by the common distribution area of both names.