A husband who came to live in his wife's house: denomination and motivation (in Arkhangelsk dialects)

The terms of kinship have always been given a lot of attention, including the terms of kinship by marriage. Among the latter, there exist numerous terms for the husband who came to live in his wife’s house. In Arkhangelsk dialects, there have been found about 40 of such terms, plus about 20 collocations. The inventory of terms of any lexical-semantic group is more abundant in dialects than in a literary language due to, primarily, word-forming derivation and also semantic derivation. The article contains a list of lexemes and in detail examines their motivation, which is mainly related to such notions as house, yard, stomach (‘propertyʼ), accept. Besides that, the terms of blood relationship and the terms reflecting the gender-age identification are used. There had to be some special reasons for a man who came to live in his wife's house: poverty, absence of his own home. On the other hand, a woman accepted her husband into her home if she was the only daughter of her parents or a widow. From the point of view of village ethics, the husband had to bring his wife to his house, and not vice versa. Thus, these men were condemned, mainly because they did not have anything of their own. The social status of the ‘adopted’ husband in the family was considered rather low, he often got ‘hurtful’ nicknames. Not only husbands came to someone else’s house, but also orphans and men who cared about the elderly. The same lexemes could combine such meanings as ‘the husband who came to live in his wife’s houseʼ, ‘the adopted childʼ, ‘the man accepted into the family of lone elderly persons as a guardian’ and ‘the mythological creature living in the houseʼ. The material is drawn from the Arkhangelsk Region Dictionary and from the author’s own notes based on field work.