Stunžinas, Robertas

The aim of this article is to give an overview of folk terms of Slavic origin naming houses and their parts and to identify semantic relations of terms – synonymy and polysemy. The article deals with more than 130 Slavisms, the material has been gathered from the main sources of spoken language and folk terminology – common dictionaries, dictionaries and atlases of dialects. Folk terminology of building is a broad, interesting and miscellaneous layer of folk terminology and is characterized by regional use, variety of expressions, figurativeness, abundance of synonyms and polysemy. Terms of Slavic origin amount to a significant part of Lithuanian folk terminology of building and make the largest group of borrowed terminology in this field. Terms of Slavic origin are used to denote almost all buildings of a traditional Lithuanian homestead. A significant part of traditional buildings and their parts have more than one name of Slavic origin. A few terms of Slavic origin can be identified as metaphoric and metaphorical transfer of the names according to emotional associations, external similarity or similarity of function is typical. Almost half of terms have more than one meaning. Polysemous terms name different constructions: building and room, part of building and room; less frequently they denote buildings or rooms of different purpose. Naming generic and specific concepts or denoting building and part of same building is not a prevalent type of polysemy of researched terminology.

The author of the calendars used more than one word to name certain concepts. L. Ivinskis tried to Lithuanianize the construction terminology and next to loan-words he also provided Lithuanian or hybrid terms, e. g. amatininkaj (mejstraj) (Eng. craftsmen), palitura (swidiklas) (Eng. polish), lakierius (apsmalka) (Eng. varnish). The construction terminology in L. Ivinskis calendars is not outdated. The majority of the terms taken from the living language, derivatives and loan-words survived until the modern days. The survived terms are used in the modern construction terminology or serve as ethnographic terms. Outdated terms and those with changed meanings did not survive while some terms are considered barbarisms.