Dialectal attribution of the Karelian language in “Guide and translator to remote outskirts of Russia” by A. V. Starchevsky

Introduction. The article examines the Karelian-language material contained in a late XIX century lexicographic edition “Guide and translator to remote outskirts of Russia” by A. V. Starchevsky. Alongside other few early printed publications containing material in Karelian, this work is of interest for researchers both in terms of the sources from which the vocabulary was derived and from the perspective of its dialectal attribution. Materials and Methods. The source of the study was the language material of the publication, grouped into sections: individual words, colloquial phrases, a brief grammatical essay. The philological method is used, as well as the methods of external and internal reconstruction of the comparative historical method. Results and Discussion. The analysis showed the linguistic material belongs to different dialects, and different sections in the edition made use of different sources. Identification of the sources also enabled the dialectal attribution of the published language material. The authors list the basic phonetic, morphological and lexical markers, concluding the origin of the dialect of this material. Conclusions. The primary sources for the Karelian vocabulary in the Russian-Karelian Dictionary were the published earlier Karelian-Finnish Dictionary based on the study by A. Genetz “Tutkimus Aunuksen kielestä”, which represents the Livvi and the nearby Karelian sub-dialects of the borderland Karelia, and the Russian-Karelian Primary “Native Karelian” by A. Tolmachevskaya, written in the Tolmachevsky dialect of Karelian. Some vivid dialectal markers point to the Karelian Proper origin of the material in two other Karelian-language parts of the work by A. V. Starchevsky.