ONCE AGAIN ON VTORA AND ON THE TRUTH CRITERIA OF AN ETYMOLOGICAL SOLUTION

The present article is concerned with the word vtóra (graphical version of ftóra) which means “a problem, misfortune, trouble, nuisance”, “something surprising; a mira cle, a wonder”, “nonsense, rubbish, gibberish”. The word is widespread in the North Rus sian dialects and associated dialects of the Urals, Siberia and the Far East. Dictionaries of the 18th and 19th centuries interpret vtóra as colloquial. There have been two versions of its origin: according to the borrowed version, the word comes from the Greek φϑορά meaning “death”. According to the original version, it is a formation from vtor- meaning “the second”. However, most researchers insist that vtóra is a borrowing.

The author of the article shows that this version has signifi cant flaws: it is unclear how exactly the word was borrowed and how this Greekism penetrated the dialects with out intermediary stages. There is no mentioning of a lexical unit *ftora (vtora) of Greek origin in any of the known historical dictionaries of the Russian language, in a large cor pus of sources with Early Russian and Old Russian texts of different genres and topics, in argot dictionaries, etc. The author supports the original version, according to which vtora is a substantivized form of the ordinal numeral the second; the etymon meaning is associated with the negative symbolism of repetition. The paper presents word-formation arguments, as well as semantic evidence (intra-cluster semantic support).