I. YAKOVLEV CHUVASH STATE PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY BULLETIN

N. I. Ashmarin, archival holdings, 17-volume dictionary, authenticity of vocabulary, semantics

The relevance of the article is due to the absence of the comparative analysis of the holdings of the Scientific Archive of the Chuvash State Institute of Humanities (SA ChSIH) and the 17-volume capital dictionary “The Dictionary of the Chuvash Language” by the correspondent member of the USSR Academy of Sciences N.I. Ashmarin. The “Dictionary” written and published in the first half of the 20^th century is based upon the texts stored in the aforesaid archives and reflect the day-to-day life and vocabulary of the traditional Chuvash society in terms of history, archaeology, religion, ethnography, language, arts, and folklore. Undoubtedly the “Dictionary” is a jewel of the Chuvash people, it is more complete and valuable than all the dictionaries of the Chuvash language and is valued highly by linguists in Russia and worldwide. It is wise to subscribe to the opinion that the Chuvash people can be proud of such an excellent dictionary. All the examples provided by the author of the article are taken from original sources de visu. The comparative analysis performed makes it possible to make a conclusion on unquestionable advantage of archival texts because they are substantially more exact and complete compared with the “Dictionary”. The idea may not be new, but it has always been an a priori one. The article is meant to continue the discussed subject, since it is being developed for the first time in this work.

Салмин Антон Кириллович ‒ доктор исторических наук, ведущий научный сотрудник отдела этнографии восточных славян и народов Европейской России Музея антропологии и этнографии имени Петра Великого (Кунсткамера) РАН, г. Санкт-Петербург, Россия; e-mail: antsalmin@mail.ru