Prerevolutionary Names of Mining Sites of the Beryozovsky Gold Deposit

The article deals with the proper names of mines, veins, digging pits, and other natural and artificial mining sites located on the territory of the Beryozovsky Gold Deposit (Middle Urals, Russia). The vast majority of these onomastic units appeared in the 18th–19th centuries, in the course of the mining development (since its start in 1745 and until 1917), and are still in more or less active use today. The study aims to identify the motivation for the toponymic objects in the area and to trace the systemic features of them as a naming system. The analysis comprises 268 units retrieved from specialized works on the history of gold mining, the Middle Urals, and specifically the Beryozovsky Deposit. To meet the goals of the study, these are considered in the motivational aspect and in terms of their systemic relations. It appears that a significant part (up to 50%) of names is the result of formal or semantic derivation and are “inherited” from other sites by metonymic transfer or due to the reorganization of previously existing mining facilities. In the motivational aspect, deanthroponymic derivatives tend to predominate. A large number of these names have a memorial character, and their eponyms are often indirectly related to the territory under consideration. In other cases, the toponyms may refer to work managers or owners of specific sites. The religious vocabulary is another important motivation source. There are relatively few names that are motivated by the essential properties of the named objects. Incidentally, these can point to the estimated gold content of the vein or to its geographical location. All these features clearly demonstrate the artificial nature of the analyzed onomastic system. On the extralinguistic side, its formation is driven by the consistent development of the field territory which required administrative regulation of naming.