Altaic Lexical Elements in the Slovo o polku Igoreve and the Sceptics

Abstract

The Slovo contains some 45 archaic words which are Altaic (Turkic) borrowings, most of which refer to the Cumans (polovci), since the epic describes the military campaign of 1185 AD against them. These archaic lexical elements in the text of the Slovo have always been an intractable problem for sceptics who have denied its antiquity and its authenticity As a rule, the sceptics disregarded them. A. Mazon offered an ingenious, yet infelicitous explanation for their presence in the Slovo, claiming that they may have been imported by Tatar catechumens. A. A. Zimin attempted to deny the antiquity of the Turkic lexical content of the Slovo. In his book, B. L. Keenan argues that words in the Slovo, identified as Turkic borrowings, are, in reality, “ghost-words”, or are words which Josef Dobrovský invented or interpolated into the Slovo from different languages. Keenan acknowledges that in addition to toponyms and proper names of Turkic origin, the Slovo contains some Turkic loan words, but these, according to Keenan, are so few, and well known, that they may be considered irrelevant by the sceptics and may be disregarded. T. Fefer maintains that several Turkic lexical borrowings in the Slovo represent references to the opponents of Feofan Prokopovič. The present article critically surveys these hypotheses from the viewpoint of lexicology