On history of a provincial town’s urbanonymy: names of saltworks of old-time Nerekhta
This research is devoted to the study of historical toponyms of the town of Nerekhta, Kostroma Region. The onyms chosen for analysis are from the town’s medieval period associated with the territory’s oldest trade - salt production and saltworks - now lost. Those include names of saltworks Redensky pochinok and Sovkova Movka , that survive in historical documents and are also found in the scientific book of Mikhail Diyev «The History of the Town of Nerekhta». To date, these names have disappeared from the town’s toponomicon due to lack of topicality. Detailed lingual and etymological analysis of the lexical units, which are part of historical toponyms, allows to identify some common features characteristic of Slavic onyms, to establish the territory of their distribution, to trace the transformations they underwent, to identify certain processes of language and ethnic origin of the territory under study; the latter, in turn, helps cast a light upon the history of settlement of Slavs of the previously Finno-Ugric, presumably Merya, lands.