Terms of venery in Croatian and Russian languages

This paper analyses and compares the principles of linguistic categorisation of terms of venery in the Croatian and Russian languages. Since the monolingual and bilingual dictionaries of the Croatian and Russian languages do not exhaustively describe restrictions or criteria for the use of nouns that denote animals with terms of venery, a corpus study was conducted on the collocations of terms of venery, which aimed to determine more precisely how terms of venery classify groups of animals in the examined languages. In total, the paper analysed the use of 10 Croatian and 10 Russian terms of venery in the corpus of the Croatian language hrWaC and the corpus of the Russian language ruTenTen11 using the Sketch Engine tool. The sample was obtained by excerpting monolingual dictionaries of the Russian and Croatian languages. The similarities and differences in the classification of animal classes and the terms of venery used with each are schematically represented by four tables in the paper, which can serve as an aid when translating from one language to the other. The analysis showed that terms of venery do not categorise all groups of animals, but those that interact closely with humans. Etymological and historical lexicographical sources were used in the paper, with the goal of determining how the lexical combination of venery terms changed and to what extent the meaning of lexemes affects the principles of classification. Three naming models of terms of venery were singled out, namely: metonymic shift, types of animal movement, and the shape formed by a group of animals in motion. Some naming models are also classification criteria by which animals are divided. Terms of venery classify the animal world in both studied languages according to whether the animals are adults or young, according to the manner of moving, belonging to a particular (super)class of animals, and some quantifiers cover only one type of animal. Terms of venery cover the analysed categories of animal species in different ways in the Russian and Croatian languages, but the principles of organisation for the categories are very similar.