SEMANTIC MODEL “DILIGENT” IN THE BALTIC-FINNIC LANGUAGES
The article presents a semantic-motivational analysis of twenty Baltic-Finnic dialect and literary language words used to nominate a hard-working person. The source of the material was the dialect dictionaries of individual Baltic-Finnish languages and their file cabinets. The data of etymological dictionaries are also involved. The undertaken research was carried out in line with ethnolinguistics, which is developing successfully in Slavic linguistics, despite the fact that practically no such studies were conducted on the material of the Baltic-Finnish languages. Involving as a comparison the corresponding results according to the Russian dialects showed that the linguistic image of the hardworking is characterized by certain universals in the motivation for naming. However, the Baltic-Finnish units differ in their specificity. The nominations of hardworking people are secondary in them and go back to the names, on the one hand, of dynamic qualities ‘quick, brisk, energetic’, on the other hand, spiritual characteristics (‘enthusiastic, passionate, greedy’) that turn out to be etymologically closely related. It was revealed that they correlate with the basics marking fast, sharp, intense movement - from walking to a blow or a gust of wind. At the same time, a significant part of the verbs of this series can be confidently qualified as having a descriptive, onomatopoeic nature, which is also inherited by the names of hard workers. The revealed regularity of semantic evolution (‘quick abrupt movement’ → ‘fast, energetic, passionate’ → ‘hardworking’) is important for establishing the etymological sources of words that represent the idea of hard work, as it defines a certain algorithm for such a search. Now the lexemes representing the established semantic paradigm are actually divorced according to different etymological articles and the connection between them is most often not indicated in any way.