Tin in Russian traditional culture: A historical-linguistic essay

The article deals with the history of tin usage in Russia. The most important fact about it is that tin was an imported metal which Russia did not produce commercially. Nevertheless, tin became an important item of domestic trade by the 17th century and was widely used by all classes of Russian society, including the peasantry. The main focus of the article is on the presence of tin and tin products in the Russian folk tradition. The article shows the breadth of the spheres of the use of tin in traditional culture (in addition to everyday life, there are the spheres of rituals and folk medicine). Historical and ethnographic information is used along with data from folk dialects and folklore to reconstruct the Russian cultural and linguistic “portrait” of tin by ethnolinguistic methods. The author makes an attempt to reveal the properties of tin that are most relevant for a naive native speaker and, accordingly, that are fixed in the secondary semantics of words formed from the name of this metal, and in contexts with their participation. The article also contains data on the history of the Russian and Slavic words for tin.