«A DICTIONARY OF RUSSIAN DEONYMS»: FROM CONCEPTION TO REALIZATION

The article is devoted to the dictionary «A Dictionary of Russian Deonyms» that was conceived by Prof. Alexandre N. Karpov and written by the present writer. It is an explanatory linguistic dictionary aimed for the general reader; its purpose is scientific and educational. The Dictionary can be of interest to linguists, University and school teachers and also to any learner and speaker of Russian. The Dictionary includes 1770 Russian deonyms, I.e., proper nouns that were transformed into common nouns in an affixless way. The chronological range is the 10th decade, XVII c. – the 2nd decade, XXI c. The Dictionary is innovative due to the big number of the deonyms that are included into it and to the multiparameter way in which they are described. In modern linguistics, the Russian deonym problem is urgent for the following reasons: Russian deonyms have been studied insufficiently so far and have never been collected in a dictionary. The present Dictionary partially bridges these gaps. The Dictionary’s author found the deonyms, illustrated them with quotations from written sources, gave each deonym a definition, identified the extralinguistic contexts that had generated the deonyms, and described the etymology of the onyms. In the present Dictionary, the deonyms show a notable thematic diversity. The structure of the entry is this: entry word; morphological variants; lexico-semantic variants; definition; illustrative quotations; etymological and encyclopedic data (names of 288 languages, dialects and ethnic groups are used here). The size of The Dictionary is 42,1 author’s sheets.