How the Name of a Stone Warns about Deception: One Nomination Motive in Mineralogical Vocabulary

Abstract

The article is devoted to the Russian mineralogical vocabulary and focuses on the names of minerals, in the internal form of which there is an indication of the “ability” to deceive an observer attributed to a stone. Such names, as a rule, reflect the experience of mineralogists or specialists in stone mining, whom the mineral, due to its similarity with some other mineral, forced to misinterpret its nature when discovered or investigated. The article includes, firstly, international gemstone names borrowed into the Russian language (names such as apatite, phenakite, sphalerite, blend). These are official names; this seems remarkable, since in this case, subjective data entered the nomenclature, contrary to the usual practice of reflecting objective data about the mineral. The nominator fixes the history of their impression of the stone in the name, attributing deceptive intentions to it. Names borrowed into Russian mineralogy, as a rule, are accompanied byan essay on the history of its origin in the source language and the history of borrowing into the Russian language. The article also considers Russian names; they are facts of the professional jargon of those who are engaged in the extraction and sale, collection of precious and ornamental stones, including, for example, names such as obmanit, fuflonit. In short, such names and the contexts of their use were collected over the course of field surveys of Middle Ural informants professionally associated with the stone, or were gleaned from their online communication at the “Khita Urala” mineralogical forum.