Lexical nominations of wolf in Russian, Kalmyk, Mongolian and German phraseology and paremiology

Abstract

Zoo lexemes, being separate lexical units and components of animalistic phraseological units (APU) and animalistic proverbial mini-texts (APMT), contribute a significant global presence in all languages. Nevertheless, the world of wild fauna is still poorly understood from a linguistic and cultural perspective. In particular, the relevant vocabulary remains understudied, although it is rich in compositional diversity encapsulating a huge body of materials. Many questions are still out of linguistic sight, although the need for a comprehensive study of animalistic vocabulary is long overdue. Lexical consistency is precisely discovered when various kinds of lexical groupings are addressed. This approach seems to be the most preferable for the authors who study APU and zoo proverbs representing a certain system. The paper proposes to use such terms as faunism, animalism, zoosemism for denoting animals and zoomorphism – for metaphorical designation of humans. The authors are concerned with Russian-Kalmyk-German-Mongolian similarities and differences in APU and zoo proverbs but they are few. Meanwhile, based on APU and APMT it is important to compare LWI animalistic fragments used by native speakers inhabiting the Caspian Sea, Central Asian and European territories for developing an adequate methodology for teaching languages within an ethno-oriented paradigm. This research area has not yet provided a systematic insight into the linguistic status of the object under study. The issues of attributing proverbs and sayings to phraseology, as well as their differentiation, remain debatable. Considering Russian phraseological and paremiological materials against a foreign language background will help to identify its idioethnic specificity and universal features. Understanding the specific phraseological and proverbial coding of the world provides better characteristics of particular ethnic linguistic and cultural attitudes. The study is relevant due to the need to produce a multilingual dictionary composed of zoo vocabulary, zoo idioms and zoo proverbs. Russian APU and APMT studied against foreign languages (Kalmyk, Mongolian and German) will result in their different types identified, both universal and specific.