ON THE ISSUE OF STUDYING COMMON NOUNS IN SART-KALMYK SONGS (BASED ON EXPEDITION MATERIALS)

Abstract

The article discusses the systematic nature of the folklore lexicon of Sart-Kalmyk songs recorded by K. E. Erendzhenov (1935), A. Sh. Kichikov (1964), U.-J. Sh. Dondukov (1975), E. R. Tenishev (1976), D. A. Pavlov (1982) and B. V. Menyaev (2009). The corpus of Sart-Kalmyk song texts has been posted by the authors of this article on the website http://kalmyki.narod.ru. The texts of the Olot songs of the Ili-Kazakh Autonomous Region of Xinjiang previously recorded by the authors of the article during the expeditions of 2012 and 2020 have been taken into consideration as well. All the nouns under analysis have been divided into the following lexico-semantic groups: “ethnonyms” (lexical units denoting people according to their nationality), “kinship terms” (lexical units denoting people according to their relationships), “lexical units denoting people according to their gender and age”, “titles” (lexical units denoting titles), “anthroponyms” (proper names); “lexical units denoting domestic animals” etc. Some lexical units are provided with comments from archival, expedition, and published materials. The analysis of the vocabulary of Sart-Kalmyk songs clearly shows that it is based on common Oirat lexicon which incorporated a number of early borrowings from other languages. Later borrowings from the Kyrgyz language have not been found in the texts of the Sart-Kalmyk songs. Therefore, the songs of the Sart-Kalmyks were created before their move to the valley of the Karakol River and before their conversion to Islam. The results of the research can contribute to further analysis of the lexical structure of Sart-Kalmyk song texts.