Traditional birth text of Podolians: anatomical and verbal codes of ritual text

Abstract

The topicality of the paper is conditioned by the need to learn the Ukrainian linguistic world-image, identification of verbal means that preserve the collective cultural code. Dialectal worldview is one of the varieties of verbal worldview, which reflecting the peculiarities of the regional worldview, represents the features of the speakers’ spiritual and material worlds perception, imprinted in the language. A dialect text is a reliable source for researching a dialectal worldview specifically and All-Ukrainian one in general. The aim of the article is to conduct the ethnolinguistic analysis of the Podolian birth texts through the prism of key linguistic and cultural ideas represented in ritual terminology, beliefs and prohibitions aimed at ensuring a happy fate for the newborn. The birth text of Podolians is considered as a linguistic and cultural text based on the unity of object, quantitative, verbal and anatomical codes. Analysis of verbal realization of anatomical and verbal codes of ritual text is the tasks of the article. Each code of the ritual text is formed by a wide corpus of analyzed names, most of which are autochthonous, Slavic in origin. The research was carried out on the dialect material collected in 62 settlements of Vinnytsia region by expedition method. The work also uses general scientific (analysis and synthesis, comparison, descriptive methods) and linguistic methods: textological (contextual analysis), comparative-historical, and the method of component analysis. It has been established that the customary instructions in the Podolian linguistic and cultural birth text, recorded in the studied territory, are a manifestation of the archaic ideas of our ancestors about the animism of the surrounding world: water, trees, earth, objects and plants are endowed with the qualities of living beings, and therefore are able to transmit their properties to humans by contacting with them. The word programs the child’s Destiny, therefore a wide range of speech formulas used at various stages of the birth ceremony, and most actively at baptisms, is aimed at ensuring a happy destiny for the child. The action in the appropriate ritual context acquires a magical role: fun, dancing, singing, treats at baptisms, according to beliefs, guarantee a happy, joyful life for a new family member. The number in folk culture is an object of symbolization and evaluation: pursuing matrimonial goals, our ancestors actively observed the parity of actions and objects in the birth ceremony. The unity of the structural elements of the Podolian birth ceremony, its nominations with the corresponding elements of the Slavs or even more broadly the Europeans testifies to its archaicness, taboo nature, and relative conservatism. In view of this, further studies of this subject have a wide heuristic potential for establishing Ukrainian-Slavic connections in the field of onomasiology, etymology and ethnology.