Журнал «Филоlogos»

THE FOLKLORE NAME AND THE PERSONAL NAME IN THE RUSSIAN FOLKLORE (COMPARED TO THE CHINESE FOLKLORE)

Author: Wang Yi

The article gives a typology of personal proper names functioning in the Russian and the Chinese texts of folklore of various genres. Special attention was given to distinguishing the peculiarities of folklore names of the fairytale characters, in particular, the mythonyms and anthroponyms. It was specifically the fairytale that gave the most material for the research, since in other types of tales, be it a mundane tale or a tale about the animals, personal proper names of characters are seldom introduced. Folklore names appear in the text of an epic saga or a fairytale due to the identifiers that determine the social or the evaluative status of a character. A personal name in the folklore worldview is a cultural-linguistic sign of the anthroponymical code of the culture. The semantic structure of a folklore name may include ethnographical, historical, culturological components besides the evaluative component. In the analysis of the constituents and the defining attributes of the folklore name in the Russian epic and paroemic (proverbial) genres, the conclusion was made that the personal proper name (that is functioning in various forms in the texts of folklore) has to be distinguished from the folklore name, which represents a certain set of distinctive features of a specific character and can be introduced into the speech of a native speaker, in other words, has the quality of precedence. The Russian folklore names that are well-known from the epic genres can be introduced in the proverbs, sayings and riddles as well. The Chinese folklore names have their own specifics, largely connected to the mythological consciousness of the nation. Although the Chinese folklore names may be used in the speech and text activities outside the folklore context, they are nevertheless always connected with folklore semantically and do not acquire a generalizing meaning in contrast to the Russian folklore names. The Chinese personal name is a non-repetitive designation of a person or a folklore character. Its meaning includes some phenomenon or object that is positively evaluated in the society and implicitly contains some peculiarities of the nominee or some well-wishing towards the bearer of the name.