Jacob Fellman’s lexical materials on the Vepsian language

In the article, the author analyzes the lexical materials on the Vepsian language contained in the notebooks of Pastor Jacob Fellman (1795–1875) that were published in the yearbook of the Finno-Ugric Society in Helsinki in 1920. J. Fellman collected individual Vepsian words and compiled comparative tables of Sami, Karelian, and Vepsian lexical units belonging to different dialects and subdialects. In total, his notes contain 197 Vepsian lexemes. Apparently, Felman systematically collected Karelian vocabulary, while Vepsian lexis came to him from random informants. The exact time when the “Chud” words were written down is not known; most likely, it was the third quarter of the 19th century. The author analyzes the Vepsian vocabulary taken from the records of Jacob Fellman primarily in terms of its dialectal affiliation. The phonetic and morphological features of the words allow us to assume the following: Fellman had no informants among the speakers of the Southern dialect; on the contrary, the overwhelming majority of words were recorded by him from representatives of the Middle Vepsian dialect; some words were likely to be recorded not from the Vepsians, but from the Karelians. Vepsian materials dating back to the 19th century are extremely rare, so each of them deserves close attention: they allow us to clarify (to a certain extent) the state of the language before the beginning of its systematic study.