Russian Ethnonyms and Related Lexical Categories in Explanatory Dictionaries

• Main Author: Aleksandr I. Grishchenko
• Format: Article
• Language: Russian
• Published: Izdatelstvo Uralskogo Universiteta 2013-12-01
• Series: Voprosy Onomastiki
• Subjects: Russian language; ethnonyms; inhabitants’ names; lexicography; semantics; ethnicity
• Online Access: http://onomastics.ru/sites/default/files/VO_2013_2(15)/Grishchenko%20Onomastic_2_2013_sm-8.pdf

The article deals with the problem of the proprial status of ethnonyms as reflected in Russian explanatory dictionaries from the first relevant editions of the last quarter of the 19th century (the unfinished experimental Comprehensive Philological Dictionary by Aleksandr Orlov, 1884–1885) till the newest Great Academic Dictionary of the Russian Language (2004–). Interpreted as appellatives, ethnonyms were gradually included in explanatory dictionaries, their spelling being at the same time codified with lowercase letters. The dictionary definitions of ethnonyms do not always distinguish them from the related lexical category of inhabitants’ names. Russian ethnonymy as reflected in dictionaries gives evidence of lexicographers’ attempts to comply with the contemporary ethnological data, but these attempts are often overshadowed by the naive idea of ethnicity. Nevertheless, this idea of ethnicity has some heuristic potential for being fixed by the language itself, hence for the purpose of this article we adopt a wide interpretation of ethnicity where ethnonyms are names of all groups of people regarded as “peoples”, “nations”, “tribes” etc.