Towards the Study of Oirat Hydronyms of the Ili River

Abstract

The paper explores Oirat hydronyms of the basin of the River of Ili (known as Ili, Tekes, Dzhirgalan, Ulan Bulak, Artsata Musar, etc.) recorded in a variety of written and oral sources of the 17th–21st centuries in different graphic and phonetic variants (in the Oirat “Clear Script,” in Latin, and in Cyrillic). Oirat river names are significantly distorted when rendered into other languages, which complicates their etymological interpretation. The material under consideration includes the translation of the 17th century “Biography of Zaya-pandita,” the map of Dzungaria by Ivan Unkovsky (1722–1724), the map of the Dzungar state of 1738 by Johan Gustaf Renat, dictionaries of the Mongolian and Turkic languages, the archive materials of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Kalmyk Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, as well as personal field materials of the authors collected in the Issyk-Kul region of Kyrgyzstan (in 2009, 2012, 2014, 2021) and the Mongol-Kurya county of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of People’s Republic of Korea (in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2021). Geographical names of the Ili River basin are very well preserved in folklore of Sart Kalmyks living in the Tekes River valley until the second half of the 19th century, as well as in the Oirat-Mongolian folklore of Xinjiang. Typologically, Oirat hydronyms of the Ili River basin include: 1) names that can be attributed to both Mongolian (Oirat) and Turkic vocabulary, 2) hybrid names consisting of Turkic and Mongolian words, 3) original Oirat names, 4) names associated with Buddhism. The semantic and etymological analysis of the Oirat hydronyms of the Ili River basin indicates that in past times, seasonal migrations of the Oirats-nomads largely depended on the water landscape, which reflected in the detailed terminology of hydrographic objects.