TO THE HISTORY OF USING UDMURT LEXICAL DIALECTISMS IN EARLY TEXTS AND PATHS TO THEIR SYNONYMIZATION (Using example words with the meaning ’to deceive’)

Abstract

Due to the lack of a common Udmurt written language, the translated texts of the first half of the 19th century and the subsequent time up to the beginning of the 20th century were formally oriented towards the native speakers of separate Udmurt dialects and therefore, they were mainly based on the Sarapul, Glazov, Kazan, Yelabuga and other dialects. However, in most cases, these translated texts - even the earliest ones - were linguistically different in various degrees from the spoken variant of the original basic dialects, since translators and editors were forced to incorporate linguistic elements from other dialects, firstly, in order to make these translations accessible for the majority of the Udmurt readers, and secondly, to enhance the expressive capabilities of the literary Udmurt language. Consequently, even the very first as well as the following Udmurt translations of Russian and (partially) Christian Tatar religious texts introduced various dialectal inclusions, especially lexical ones. The article discusses the ways and methods of using inter-dialectical lexical parallels with special attention to one of them, consisting of lexical units with the common meaning “to deceive” (in the clerical literature also “seduce, tempt”): southern aldani̮, peripheral southern and central örekč́ani̮ and northern pöjani̮. In the end, these specific words and a number of other inter-dialectal correspondences close to each other in meaning were subjected in the Udmurt literary language to full or partial synonymization, as evidenced by the language of Udmurt printed materials of recent decades.