Abstract:
The article proves the hypothesis of the origin of the Russian colloquial word
mazurik as deriving from the name of the Polish ethnographic group mazury
‘Mazurs’—inhabitants of Mazovia (in central and south-eastern Poland) as well as
immigrants from this area to other places, mainly in the north-east. This hypothesis
had previously been stated in the literature, but it had not been demonstrated
rigorously. The authors show that the word mazurik is included in the big semantic
word family that is derived from mazur, by studies focused on nationwide usage
and through dialects. Using data from the lexical system and from folklore, the
linguistic portrait of the Mazurs in the Russian tradition is reconstructed, and it is
compared with linguistic stereotypes of the Mazurs in the source language (Polish)
and the languages of peoples in close contact with the Mazurs (Ukrainian and
Belarusian). The main features of these portraits are the same in these languages,
and they create a negative image of the Mazur in the Slavic tradition, making the
“Polish” etymological version semantically legitimate. In addition, the authors
prove this hypothesis from the point of view of word formation, linguogeography,
and sociolinguistic characteristics of the words under consideration. It is noted that
the derivatives of the word family derived from mazur are aË racted to the lexemes
which have similar form and meaning but diff erent origin, in particular, to derivatives
of the verb mazat' and the words murza and zamurzannyi. The article contains
an overview with commentary of hypotheses about the origin of the Russian
mazurik existing in Slavic etymological literature.
