“HEN” AND “COCK” IN FOLK AND ACADEMIC BOTANICAL TERMS IN RUSSIAN
The article deals with nominational and ethnographical features of Russian plant names derived from such bird names as kuritsa ‘hen’ and petukh ‘cock’. There are 20 such names in Russian, which denote 86 plants from 67 botanical families. A huge amount of plants and a small number of names used for them can be both explained by the fact of botanical homonymy. Therefore one name (along with its variations) is used for denoting a number of plants. The biggest groups of homonyms are built by plant names as kurinaya slepota ‘night blindness’ (literally ‘hen blindness’) and petushok ‘little cock’. The other phenomenon is the one of botanical synonymy. Thus a number of dialectal plant names can denote only one plant. However there are not so many botanical synonyms among the studied plant names. The study of plant names etymology and the analyzing of ethnographical data concerning birds as hen and cock in Russian traditional culture allow categorizing the plant names according to their nominational features. There were determined the following nominational features: plant habitus, medical and household use of plant (like for hen feed), playing or ritual use of plant, plant injuriousness for people or birds. Also some plant names were given in connecting with features that hen or cock has in Russian traditional culture, for example plants with phallic racemes or long narrow leaves are called cock plants because the cock symbolizes manliness. It should be also noted, that the nominational features or origin of some plant names can’t be found out. The most common reason is that some mistakes occurred by rewriting or while compelling the botanical dictionaries. Despite that fact the ethnographical approach proves itself as a very efficient one and can provide some useful information, which usually isn’t present in linguistic sources.
Keywords: plant name, bird name, nominational features, botanical synonymy, botanical homonymy, botanical terminology
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Issue: 4, 2014
Series of issue: Issue 4
Rubric: LINGUISTICS
Pages: 13 — 20
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