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HOW SEMANTIC CHANGES CAN REVEAL THE ORIGINS OF THE STAVROPOL DIALECT OF ESTONIAN LANGUAGE // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2022. Issue 4 (38). P. 41-47

In the village of Podgornoye, founded in 1815 in the Andropovsky district of the Stavropol region, 70 descendants of Estonian settlers live to this day, speaking their language in everyday life. Several expeditions were made to this village to describe the dialect comprehensively. We recorded the narrations, songs, stories, and a dictionary of 1869 lexemes from the native speakers of Podgornoe. This dictionary is available on Lingvodok [Dictionary of Estonian dialect p. Podgornoe 2022]. In this article, the first part of this work, an analysis of semantic differences of words from the dialect of Podgornoe village compared with Estonian literary language and Estonian dialects is carried out. In order to classify the semantic differences, Estonian words were selected from 1869 words and sorted into groups. The words that also occur in the literary language are of interest but have different meanings. There were 12 such words. Then the words from the Podgorny dialect were compared with more than 250 Estonian dialects listed in the Dialect Dictionary of Estonian Language [Eesti Murrete Sõnaraamat 1994]. The analysis showed that the vast majority of words (more than 1800) in the Estonian dialect of Podgornoe village have the same meaning as in the written language. Considering that the Estonian inhabitants of Podgornoe were resettled more than 200 years ago, it is obvious that the Estonian written language is quite archaic, and the dialect of the settlers had a small number of innovations, namely eight lexemes whose meaning has no equivalent in other Estonian dialects. In one case, kɨɾ̠ ku 'height,' which occurs in the language of speakers from the village of Podgornoe, is not found in the literary dialect but occurs in both southern and northern dialects and is thus archaic. In three other cases, the innovation occurring in the village of Podgornoe is mentioned only in the northern dialects, and the word l̪ ʲol̪ l̪ us̪ 'madness' only in a dialect in the village of Laius.

Keywords: dialects, semantics, toponyms, map analysis, Estonian