On the vocabulary of the Old Believers of Romania in historical-comparative retrospective

Abstract

The article deals with the vocabulary of the traditional folk culture of Old believers who moved to the Danube and in other regions from the Russian Empire since the late seventeenth century, and later in the XVIII–XIX centuries as a result of religious persecution. The study is based on own fi eld data collected in language and folk traditions of old believers in Dobrogea in Romania (2006–2013). A contrastive analysis of the Lexis of the Dictionary of Russian Academy (1789–1794) reveals the lexical units that are almost not changed due to the fact that the old believers were during three centuries in linguistic, cultural and religious isolation. It is determined that a number of the lexical units are not fi xed in the Dictionary of the late eighteenth century, for various reasons, including the concept of the dictionary, and there is also the vocabulary that is presented in the Dictionary, but not recorded during the field work among the old believers in the isolated enclave. Semantic changes and new connotations that have developed in the new conditions of the existence of the so-called lipovan language of the Danube region are traced.