Institute of Linguistics, Literature and History, Karelian Research Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Petrozavodsk, Russian Federation, irma.mullonen@hotmail.com
ABSTRACT
Introduction: based on the material of the Finnish and Karelian languages eight descriptive polysemantic words are considered, in the semantic structure of them the seme ‘lazy person, slacker’ is present (the nest jona, jähmä, kihnu, kotka, könsä, sitkeä, töhmä, vänkä). They are selected from more than two dozen corresponding nominations as demonstrating a common algorithm of semantic development.
Objective: to identify the origin of nominations and the logic of cognitive perception of the image of a slacker.
Research materials: dialect dictionaries and card index of Finnish and Karelian subdialects.
Results and novelty of the research: it has been proven that the considered names of lazy people are secondary and go back to words with the semantics of ‘hard, rigid, inflexible’: shrammed with cold, iced, tight. It turned out that the latter are related to the productive bases marking slow movement with overcoming resistance, movement. Thus, a semantic evolution is established from ‘slow, overcoming resistance, movement’ through ‘hard, rigid’ to ‘lazy’. This line is confirmed by the nominations of hard-working people, in the internal form of which verb stems are found that also characterize movement, but
fast, abrupt. The established pattern allows us to advance in the search for the etymological origins of the nominations of lazy people. Now the lexemes representing the established semantic paradigm are actually separated into different etymological articles and the connection between them is most often not indicated in any way.
Key words: Baltic-Finnish languages, etymology, ethnolinguistics, polysemy, semantic and motivational reconstruction, semantic derivation, seme, inner form of a word, etymological nest, descriptive vocabulary
Acknowledgments: the publication was prepared as part of the planned research topic “Baltic-Finnish languages of Northwestern Russia in the context of digitalization of scientific knowledge” (№ 124022000089-4).
For citation: Mullonen I. I. Nominations of lazy people in the Baltic-Finnish languages: reconstruction of the prototypical semantics of movement // Vestnik ugrovedenia = Bulletin of Ugric Studies. 2025; 15 (2/61): 264–273.