The Appellative Latv. žīgurs and the Onym Žīguri in a Geolinguistic and Etymological Perspective

Abstract

This article aims to trace one of the Latvian names for the sparrow – the lexeme žīgurs – from the perspectives of distribution and etymology. In the latter half of the 20th century, the appellative žīgurs was found within a compact area in northeastern Vidzeme and northern Latgale (see Map 1). The geographical linguistic information from 19th- and 20th-century lexicographic sources expands this distribution area towards the west and southwest. The lexeme žīgurs is included in the dictionaries of Jakob Lange and Karl Christian Ulmann. However, in J. Lange’s dictionary, this word denotes a stork, while in K. C. Ulmann’s dictionary, it refers to a sparrow.

The onym Žīgurs (also in plural as Žīguri) similarly indicates the extended distribution area of the appellative žīgurs. The onym Sigur appears in the Vidzeme plow review documents from 1638 in six locations. In the 20th and 21st centuries, it has been used as the name of villages, homesteads, taverns, lakes, fields, meadows, and other places. It is also known as a surname.

Linguists have been interested in the etymology of the lexeme žīgurs since the second half of the 19th century. The first to propose a hypothesis about the connection between the Prussian singuris ‘goldfinch’ and the Latvian žīgurs was F. Fick. However, the distribution area of the lexeme žīgurs is not typical for Prussian loanwords. J. Endzelīns does not separately address the etymology of the appellative žīgurs but, in relation to the standard Latvian word for sparrow, zvirbulis, suggests that it could have originated from the contamination of the root virb- (Polish wróbel, Russian воробей) with words containing z- or ž- (Latvian zvĩgurs, zvipuris, žīgurs) (ME IV 777).