Самодийская космонимия в сибирско-североамериканском контексте
Samoyed cosmonymy in Siberian and North American context

Summary/Abstract: Data on the cosmonymy of the peoples speaking (mostly Northern) Samoyedic languages are compared with the data on other Siberian and North American traditions. Statistical processing of the complete set of mythological motifs recorded in Siberia as well as tracing of the spread of particular interpretations related to stellar objects and spots on the Moon demonstrate that, for languages belonging to different branches of particular families, similarity between sets of motifs is not higher than that for totally unrelated languages. Such similarities mostly correlate with geographic nearness and shared sets of ethnographic traits. Most of Samoyedic and other Siberian cosmonyms find parallels in the North American North and West (but not further to the South). To be brought there, the corresponding motifs must have been known in Siberia at the time when the last groups of migrants began to move to the New World (terminal Pleistocene — early Holocene). The recognized linguistic reconstructions do not reach so deep. The absence of correlation with the linguistic data is explained by the very fact that sets of motifs contain information on very old and long lasting processes. Because the mythological motifs can be borrowed or lost separately and not as whole sets, it would be unwise to expect such sets to continue to be linked with their languages through the course of millennia. However, the areal sets of motifs preserve unique information on contacts that are remote both in time and in space.

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