Structural and Semantic Features of Oman’s Toponyms as the Reflection of the Country’s Linguistic Situation and Material and Non-Material Culture

Toponyms of the Sultanate of Oman so far have not been studied in Russian linguistics in general, and in Russian Arabic studies, in particular. Due to the fact that in Oman there is a specific landscape and peculiar material culture, and the local variation of the Arabic language is characterized by multi-level dialectal peculiarities, the authors assumed that the toponyms of this country should demonstrate certain trends in the place names formation against the backdrop of the common Arabic toponymy. The object of the research is a wide range of toponyms of the Sultanate of Oman - from the names of the largest locations to the ones which are less significant in historical and economic terms, but are of interest from the viewpoint of the linguistic material analysis. The authors examined a large sample of toponyms of various categories, above all, oeconyms and hydronyms; due to the local natural conditions, their share in the country’s toponymy is very significant. The article is aimed at highlighting both the universal, pan-Arabic features and solely the Omani ones in the semantics and algorithms of toponymic word-building of the country. The main local toponyms were considered in terms of their origin, etymology, frequency of formants, morphological composition, as well as in relation to certain semantic fields. This made it possible to systematize the toponyms of Oman and draw a number of conclusions regarding the historically conditioned absence of loan words among Omani toponyms, their complexity with the predominance of specific lexemes characterizing the local landscape, the inclusion of Omani toponyms in lexical groups related to water, as well as the nationally-oriented world picture reflected in characteristics-indices of similar objects of Omani geography. To this end, the researchers used data from subsidiary and related humanitarian areas - geography, history, sociology, ethnopsychology. The work contributes to the study of the semantics of toponyms, comparative toponymy, Arabic lexicology, Russian Arabic studies as well as regional studies.