ON THE WRITTEN HISTORY OF THE WORD LUD ‘FIELD’ IN THE UDMURT LANGUAGE

Abstract

Тhe article off ered to the reader examines the written history of the Udmurt word lud “fi eld”, starting from the time of its fi rst fi xation in the second half of the 18th century to the present day. This lexeme, which originally meant “fi eld,” has signifi cantly expanded its semantics over the 250 years of language development. In the latest “Udmurt-Russian Dictionary” (2008), the word lud has 4 meanings: ‘fi eld, fi eld; ancestral sacrifi cial grove; ‘wild’; steppe’. It should also be noted that it is the fi rst component of complex words denoting some vocabulary of fauna and fl ora, and in the modern Udmurt language it is written together. The relevance of the topic is due to the current insuffi cient knowledge of the lexical system of the Udmurt language, especially from a historical point of view, which is a certain obstacle to knowledge of the material and spiritual culture of the Udmurt people, as well as their connections with other nationalities. The subject of the study is the Udmurt word lud. The author, based on written documents from diff erent times in the Udmurt language, traces the gradual expansion of its semantics to the present day. In the middle of the 19th century, in the first translations of the Gospels, the word was adapted to designate the term “desert” and the attribute “wild”, and in dictionaries of a later period and the latest written sources it also received mythological semantics “sacrifi cial grove” and “guardian spirit (master) sacrifi cial grove.” In terms of its origin, the word lud is very ancient, it belongs to the Ural layer: in the etymological literature, its correspondences are registered in both closely related and distantly related languages.