Old Turkic And Modern Bashkir Names Of Trees And Their Parts

Abstract

The present article is devoted to the comparative study of lexis of the Old and Middle Turkic written monuments and the modern Bashkir language and the identification of semantic peculiarities of the analysed vocabulary units. The lexical material is analysed both diachronically and synchronously using contrastive, comparative, comparative-historical and descriptive methods. This set of methods lets authors conduct a detailed study of names of the trees and their parts used in the Old and Middle Turkic monuments in comparison with the modern Bashkir and other Turkic languages. The phytonyms' basis of the modern Bashkir language denoting the names of parts of plants, wild trees, fruit trees and bushes is the Old Turkic stratum. The Old Turkic stratum is a Common Turkic relic. For thousands of years the Turkic-speaking people preserved the basic Common Turkic word-names denoting the plant kingdom unchanged. It is explained by the fact that their formation took place at the time of the greatest similarity of the Turkic languages and dialects. A certain part of the Old Turkic names of trees and their parts has undergone semantic changes in the modern Bashkir language. Plant names of the modern Bashkir language being the oldest historic stratum of the Bashkir language represent material and spiritual culture and household of the people starting from the earliest times. The main part of the names was formed at the time of the Old Turkic linguistic community, as evidenced by the plant names which nowadays are widely spread in many Turkic languages.