Month names in Shor

Abstract

The Shors are one of the minor indigenous Turkic peoples of Siberia the majority of whom are living in the Kemerovo Oblast’. The Shor language is a conglomeration of two basically very different northern Turkic dialects, identified by river names as Kondoma Shor (the southern dialect) and Mrass Shor (the northern dialect). The Mrass dialect belongs to the azaq[/taγlγ]-group, whereas the Kondoma dialect belongs to the [ayaq/]taγlγ-group. The Shor literary language was formed on the basis of the Mrass dialect in the 1920s but soon after its formation it suffered a decline from the late 1930s to the early 1990s due to the Soviet policy of assimilation of minorities. It is now a severely endangered language. In the present paper the month names in Shor (Mrass dialect) are treated. The material is based on the fieldwork study of the Altaic Society of Korea and the testimony of month names in the Shor dictionaries. Wherever necessary, these month names were also compared with those to be found in other Turkic languages.