Folklore Texts Research Articles

Зоонимы, обозначающие оленевых в алтайской лингвокультуре

The article is devoted to the linguistic and cultural specificity of zoonyms denoting reindeer family members (sygyn ‘deer, deer’ and bulan ‘elk’) in the Altai culture. A case study of artistic and folklore texts and field materials allowed the phonetic, dialect, lexical-semantic, folklore, and ethnographic features of zoonyms denoting deer animals in the Altai language and folklore to be identified for the first time. The cultural stereotypes of the Altai people about deer are closely related to hunting customs and traditions. In hunting folklore, reindeer family members have a sacred meaning: they are considered sacred animals of Altai, the personification of the master spirit of Altai. In this context, a complete system of prohibitions and taboos has been formulated within the realm of hunting ethics. In the fiction of the Altai people, the deer and elk became animal characters of hunting stories and are also used for comparisons and metaphorical allegories about humans. In folklore and artistic texts, the denotative features of zoonyms characterize the features of the body structure or color, the habitat of these wild animals. The connotations associated with these zoonyms serve as a reflection of a person’s moral and ethical character. In the linguistic consciousness of native speakers of the Altai language and culture, deer and elk are associated with male strength and courage. The participation of zoonyms-reindeer in the conceptualization of spatial and temporal concepts is presented in chrononyms (sygyn ai ‘month of deer’) and toponyms indicating the habitat of moose and deer (for example, Bulandu ‘with moose’).

Voda i ogon v slavyanskoy simvolike snovideniy i v simvolicheskom yazyke kultury

The analysis of oral folk interpretations of dreams and dream books lets us determine the range of symbolic meanings for each of the two elements—fire and water. This range represents a semantic paradigmatic structure—an area with a certain symbolism. In a certain sense it resembles what is called a lexical nest or a semantic field in linguistics. The interaction between the symbolism of fire and the symbolism of water is in their partial imposing on each other and is distributed crosswise: dreams about water can get fiery symbolism and vice versa, the three varieties of earthly, heavenly and human symbolism. For example, swamp may be dreamt of to tears and sunny weather; fish to tears, rain and fever; the sun to rain, clear weather and fire; flames and fire to rain and sunny weather. The balance of water and fire symbolism, their mutual influence (its interaction with the symbolism of cold/hot) up to their unification, mixture, and neutralization is widely represented in a language and culture—in folklore texts, ritual and magical actions and beliefs, in an author’s poetry, literature, fine arts and psychoanalysis. The mechanisms of such symbolic correlation and interaction are constantly reproduced. All this makes it possible to reveal universal cultural senses and highlight the peculiarities of the structure of the symbolic language of culture.

Одиночество в песенном фольклоре на матримониальную тематику (на материале Брестчины)

The article analyzes folklore-song interpretation of loneliness and accompanying feelings in the context of actualization of certain cultural imperatives and genre scenarios related to marriage and subsequent family life, which is considered mainly from the position of problematization of the young daughter-in-law inclusion in it. The main attention is paid to hymeneal songs, nonceremonial lyrics and ballads on matrimonial themes, which model the transformation process of the lyrical heroine (ceremonial character) with the help of such conceptual codes as action, locative, ornithological, as well as using symbols of isolation-fencing, metamorphosis and inclusion of neophyte into a new group. The considered folklore texts (in their semiotic meaning) act as a peculiar language, often the only one legitimized by tradition, through which in real communication situations its «bearers» articulate the state of solitude, isolation of a bridegirl and young married woman, as well as related social and psychological problems and such feelings or states as longing, despondency, destitution, desolation, fear, hopelessness, suffering.

ФОЛЬКЛОР І ЗВИЧАЄВЕ ПРАВО: ПРАВОВІ СМИСЛИ В УКРАЇНСЬКИХ НАРОДНИХ ТРАДИЦІЯХ

Folklore is a key source for understanding the fundamentals of legal relations in the traditional Ukrainian society. The proposed article focuses on customary law as an archaic form of legal relations that developed as a creative product with characteristic features of a folklore text, namely variability, anonymity, syncretism, where ritual becomes a tool for manifesting and implementing the custom, making it public. In this context, folk poetic creativity emerges as the oldest source of the Ukrainian legal culture. The research highlights that folklore texts contain significant elements that help reveal the characteristic features of traditional legal systems, including labor relations, rituals, social contracts, and sales agreements. A philological approach to deciphering legal relics, based on the analysis of folk tales, songs, proverbs, sayings, and rituals, is a novel direction in folklore and humanities research in general. Through this approach, the article reveals the diversity of cultural traditions that served as a legal basis in the Ukrainian society and shows how customs regulated labor and social relations. The study offers a new perspective on the importance of folk poetic texts as a source of legal culture demonstrating how they reflect and shape societal norms, reinforcing them with collective rituals and ceremonies. This approach helps uncover hidden meanings and legal principles that define traditional life, making them accessible to the modern reader. The study draws attention to the underexplored ways of understanding the specificity of the unique Ukrainian legal culture through the decoding of the legal semantics in oral texts and ritual actors’ regular practices. The proposed ideas are based on the experience of studying the history of the Ukrainian customary law by scholars from the University of Saint Volodymyr and the author’s interpretation of folklore as a semiosphere of traditional meanings, where legal senses are significant, and their variable, as well as public expression through ritual texts has sanctioning power and is part of collective communication.

Toponyms in the Context of the Winter Farewell Rite on the Belarusian-Ukrainian

The article offers an analysis of the toponyms found in rhymed sentences accompanying the local rite of celebrating a farewell to winter and welcoming spring in Western Polesie (Brest, Volyn, Rivne regions). The ceremony is timed to the first Sunday or Monday after Easter and is a typical example of ritual expulsion (in this case, of the calendar season). The range of toponyms, as well as the vector nature of the expulsion of winter from its “own” to some “outer” space bring insight into the local ideas about symbolic boundaries, as well as the formation of mental maps reflecting the mythology of space in the minds of (micro)local population. Verbal formulas including toponyms demonstrate different ways of structuring space by means of a language (from the center to the periphery, inside and outside of the “own” space, crossing symbolic boundaries), outline the main vectors of the ritual path of the mythologized character (the winter) — microlocal, local, regional, state. In some cases, the choice of the place of winter’s exile from a particular locality is determined by its status and significance for the local confessional tradition. Some forms of toponyms recorded in folklore texts are conditional on the structure of the text (the name changes under the influence of rhyme, consonance, alliteration). The vocabulary of the winter send-off ceremony is organically consistent with the ethnodialect subdivision of Polesie. The expulsion of winter to the west is determined by the clear western border of the region where the rite takes place (the Drogichin — Pruzhany — Kamen-Kashirsky line). Taking into account the division of the Polesie region along the north-south axis, the author argues that for the rite that is spread exclusively in the northern part of Western Polesie, the south (southwest, southeast) becomes the priority direction of the expulsion of winter from the “own” into the “outer” space which is evidenced by toponyms from ritual texts.

КАК ИСТОРИЯ СТАНОВИТСЯ ФОЛЬКЛОРОМ: МЕХАНИЗМЫ ФОЛЬКЛОРИЗАЦИИ ИСТОРИЙ О ВОЙНЕ И ХОЛОКОСТЕ

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries folklorists used to believe that folklore can be a historical source. But soon this belief was refuted, and any attempts to correlate folklore and reality began to look unscientific and even ridiculous for many years. Folklore texts began to be spoken of as stable structures in which the narrative pattern dominates the details. However, the corpus of folklore texts about recent historical events, such as the Great Patriotic War and the Holocaust, is still being formed in our time. Based on interviews dedicated to the memory of the occupation and collected during expeditions to Rostov-on-Don, the Bryansk region and the North Caucasus, we described two mechanisms by which the narrative of real events turns into quasi-historical folklore narratives. The first folklorization mechanism is adding specific details to evoke strong emotions in the listener and force him to pass the text on. The second mechanism that distinguishes the evidence from the quasi-historical folklore narrative is the “moral” message contained in the text. In such stories, the perpetrators always are punished, and the people who have acted right are rewarded.

On Studying the Mountain Mythonymy of the Urals: Mythonyms Motivated by Social Vocabulary

This article discusses the mountain metonymy of the Urals, i.e. the designation of supernatural anthropomorphic creatures that store the riches of the subsoil (minerals and metals) and contribute to or hinder their discovery, extraction, and processing. Russian mountain mythology has been studied by folklorists, but the linguistic aspect is only beginning to be explored. The material for the article was collected in the field between 2020 and 2023, and derived from dictionaries, folklore texts, and authorial literature. The author mostly focuses on Middle Ural and South Ural mythonyms; for comparison, the article draws on material of other zones connected with the Urals geographically or historically (Bashkiria, Siberia). The article provides detailed descriptions of the motivations of mythonyms and the conditions for the appearance of nominations. Mountain mythonymy can be divided into several groups depending on the motivation, i. e. the thematic group of vocabulary underlying the mythonym. This article analyses mythonyms motivated by social vocabulary, namely, denoting a person or kinship: золотая девка (golden girl), каменная девка (stone girl), горная девка (mountain girl), чудская девица (Chudskaya maiden), горный батюшка (mountain father), горная матка (mountain mother), Шубин (Shubin), etc. The article reveals and explains the specificity of Ural mountain mythonymy: thus, the девка token is used for the nomination of female spirits, whereas the баба nomination is characteristic of traditional Russian peasant mythology. An expressive feature of Ural mountain mythonymy is the presence of mythonyms formed from toponyms (девка Азовка, девка Дедюрка). The article proves that the formation of mountain mythonymy was influenced by the mythology of the Russian peasantry, the mythology of the autochthonous peoples of the Urals (Turkic and Finno-Ugric), as well as the terminology of mining actively developing in the Urals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Способы выражения сравнения в тазовском диалекте селькупского языка

The Taz Selkups are the most significant single-dialect speaking group. Being isolated from the Russian population, they did not know Russian until the second half of the 20th century. The documented texts of the traditional Taz Selkup folklore were analyzed to identify the diachronically early ways of expressing comparative relations. It was found that the equivalent comparison prevails in diachronically early mythological texts and is realized by syntactic constructions denoting similarity. The comparative relation of similarity of the object and the standard of comparison according to a certain characteristic is expressed mainly by postpositions. The postpositions tarД (tar) ‘like’, ‘like someone else’, car ‘how’, saqyn ‘respectively’, ‘similarly’, ‘just like’, and kəpy ‘with value’ are combined with pronouns and nouns in the possessive and non-possessive form of the genitive. The postpositional construction functioning rule is to place the word preceding the postposition in the genitive form. All the postpositions mentioned (except car) are commonly used in non-metaphorical comparisons. The postposition car functions in metaphorical comparisons, requiring the preceding word in the locative adjectival form. A synthetic indicator, the special “coordinate” case affix šaŋ, is sometimes used to express an equivalent comparison mainly in diachronically early constructions of complicated sentences, with verbal nouns and adverbial participles predominating. A non-equivalent comparison reflecting the differences between the object and the standard is realized by constructions including the object of comparison (noun or pronoun in the main case), the standard of comparison (a noun or a pronoun in the form of an ablative), and the sign underlying the comparison (an adjective or an adverb).

ФОЛЬКЛОРНИЙ РЕСУРС НАЦІОНАЛЬНОЇ КУЛЬТУРИ ЯК ІДЕОЛОГІЧНА ПЛАТФОРМА ПРЯМОСТОЯННЯ УКРАЇНЦІВ У ВІЙНІ

The article is devoted to the study of the current state of folklore text creation and author's text folklorism in the conditions of the russian-Ukrainian’s war active phase. Considering the previous theoretical works on the issue, the author of the article adds obscure data to the military cultural discourse, which can become a methodological tool for identifying the patterns of folklore meaning generation and the creative reception of the folklore element by the author's subjection in order to establish conventional links between the author and the audience, for the consolidation of national concepts of all the participants of cultural communication. The object of analysis of the article are the materials obtained from social Internet networks and the YouTube platform, the texts of oral histories that have the potential to be folklorized within a definite folklore group, and the author's artistic texts, the source of which were folklore allusions and reminiscences. The researcher focuses on the subjects of the author's and collective subjectivity interaction, notes the levels of stylization of the author's interpretation and the possibilities of genre transitions caused by the change in the function of the variant, and also concludes about the loss of the ritual function in favour of the psychotherapeutic and social program. The author of the article extrapolates the data of the motif-motive index of the folklore repertoire of the 20th century world wars (O. Kuzmenko) to the motif series in its motivic and allomotive textual realization of new works and reveals coincidences, which indicates the prospect of their folklorization at least at the level of family memorabilia. Variability remains a defining marker of folklorization of an author's work: only periodic monitoring of this content through repeated fixation will allow us to draw final conclusions. The studio presents the possibilities of the Internet platform not only as a "laboratory" of folklore text creation, but also as the highest method of mediated transmission of both classical folklore forms and traditional ideas - the "building material" of new formations.

Theonyms of the Highest Pantheon in Folklore Texts of the Altaians

This article reveals the semantics and origin of theonyms of the highest pantheon of the pagan tradition of the Altaians (Teleuts, Telengits, Altai-Kizhi, Chalkans, Tubalars, and Kumandins) on the basis of folklore material. The relevance of the study is associated with an increased interest in Tengrian religion among the modern peoples of the Altaic language family. The innovative character of the research lies in the application of the ethnolinguistic onomastic approach to the study of theonyms of the Altaians. The main research method is a descriptive method based on the contextual and semantic analysis of theonyms. Particular attention is paid to the internal form and origin of theonyms. The author concludes that the highest pantheon among the Altaians was formed on the basis of the cult of the sky and represents the personification of the heavenly elements, which is akin to many developed mythological systems of antiquity. Teheri ‘Sky’ stands out as the Supreme God belonging to the Upper world. The subject of deification in Altai folklore was the idea of natural elements and cosmic phenomena, which are a kind of force that can affect a person’s life. The personification of various qualities and parts of the sky was reflected in various names of celestial deities, the constituent parts of which contain the lexeme Teheri ‘Sky’. Some theonyms appeared because of the personification of celestial phenomena: thunder, lightning, and hail. The author notes that the process of identifying various deities embodying various attributive qualities and characteristics of the supreme god seems to be a historically later stage in the development of polytheism than the time of the appearance of the idea of the one god Teheri ‘Sky’. With the adoption of the ideas of other world religions (Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity) and shamanism with its polytheism in the culture of the Turkic-Mongolian peoples, the status of the deities of the Upper World was ranked, including the status of the supreme god Teheri ‘Sky’, which was replaced by other theonyms.

Риторический потенциал фольклорного слова

The study is devoted to the analysis of a whole complex of factors that determine the formation of the rhetorical properties of a folklore word as a key component of a traditional folklore text. The relevance of the study is seen in the existing discrepancy between the stable nature of the folklore word as a unit of traditional culture and its resonant power, which causes emotional responsiveness of the audience and provides the rhetorical potential of the word in folk culture, which requires scientific understanding. In the course of the study, significant factors influencing the formation of the rhetorical properties of a traditional word were identified and substantiated. It is noted that a folklore word, like any word in traditional culture, having a high degree of generalization and semantic integrity, gives rise to a special aesthetic feeling in the recipient, based on a deep knowledge of the common traditional culture. Due to the meaningful dynamism, the folklore word acquires the ability to influence the performers and the audience, to arouse in them a sense of belonging to the ideal common for a given linguistic community. Under the conditions of the oral form of existence, the existence of a traditional word in a subject-aesthetized environment, the continuity of a folklore creative act, the special nature of communication based on the synchronism of the process of performing and perceiving the text, the simultaneity of the experiences of the performer and the listener, ensuring the active perception of a folklore work, subject to the common folklore tradition the performer and recipient of the traditional folklore word is provided with an increase in rhetorical potential and, ultimately, the preservation of the folklore tradition.

Лингвосемиотические особенности знаков смерти в хантыйских народных сказках и преданиях

The paper analyzes the phenomenon of death through Khanty folk tales, legends, and bailichkas. The necessity of characterizing the death phenomenon – the structure of death signs, their sources, their occurrence in texts – is substantiated, and a brief analysis of the scholarly literature on the subject in question is provided. Death is commonly addressed in folklore, except in children’s fairy tales, where death is portrayed more discreetly. The death signs are described within the classification of the American pecialist in semiotics, C. S. Pierce, also considering the experience of D. A. Pisarenko, who systematized the death signs in the Russian folk tales. Folklore texts feature the death theme when the protagonist encounters hostile spirits, fights enemies, or meets dead people. This theme has its specific place in various folklore genres, with its signs classified by certain plot types. Found in the texts are indirect signs of death not referring directly to death, but only hinting at it. The analysis of four bailichkas reveals the deeds of aggressive deceased persons representing the death signs together with the coffin, bones, a deserted camp, and cut hair. Four types of mixed death signs have been found: (1) “index + icon” signs associated with personal knowledge about biological death and reflecting the external death signs; (2) “index + symbol” signs associated with death through funeral rites; (3) “symbol + index” signs represented by one sign – “lower world” – reflecting the religious views of a person, (4) “symbol + index + icon” signs, most ancient and semantically ambiguous signs.

Об исследовательском потенциале лексикографических комплексов фольклорных текстов

The article deals with the lexicographic complexes of folklore texts and their research potential. The structure of the complexes and the principles of their creation are described. Each component of the complex is briefly characterized: folklore megatext, alphabetical frequency glossary, word list and concordance. The folklore megatext is viewed as a unified text that combines specific passportized texts related by genre and spatiotemporal characteristics. The alphabetical frequency glossary includes all megatext lexemes, arranged in alphabetical order, indicating the frequency of each word. It is created by means of a special computer program NewSlov. The word list represents language units in a descending order of frequency, and the concordance is an alphabetical list of all the words of the folklore megatext with the contexts of their usage. The basis of the first complexes was the collection The Great Russian Folk Songs. The choice was due to the authority of the collection, in which the texts are systematized according to the topical principle and are accompanied by the indication of the territory and the time of their recording. With the complex “Voronezh” as an example, the author shows that each component of the complex has an independent research value for studying the language of folklore of a particular genre and region. She emphasizes that the availability of different complexes created by the same research team based on the same principles allows carrying out comparative studies to identify the genre and territorial specificity of the folklore language. Certain examples demonstrate the opportunities of a comparative analysis of word lists of different folklore genres (non-ritual lyrics, epics, fairy tales), individual word-formation families (with the root skor- and sovet-) and even specific lexemes (adjective khudoy). The author concludes that lexicographic complexes bear high research potential. They combine focus on each linguistic phenomenon with attention to all the material and turn out to be a reliable instrument for solving urgent issues of linguistic studies of folklore related to the specifics of the language of different genres of folklore, territorial differentiation and idiolectic nature of folk song language. In addition, lexicographic complexes become a certain platform for creating dictionaries of various types, among which the already tested experimental forms stand out: contrastive dictionaries and dictionaries of a single word. The prospects for further lexicographic work are outlined. They are connected with the expansion of the source base of complexes of folklore texts and the application of this idea in authorial lexicography. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

EPITHETIC OBJECTIVATION OF THE ETHNO-CULTURAL CODES

The understanding of the world and its interpretation are vividly reflected by the people with the help of tropes. The identification of ethnocultural parameters in tropes, particularly in epithets, is an important aspect of anthropocentric studies. The trope system clearly represents the peculiarity of the linguistic thinking of an ethnos. The research is aimed at identifying the connotative nature of epithets, their ethno-cultural semantics and their characteristics as an indicator of the ethno-cultural code. The purpose of the article is to correlate folklore epithets with ethnocultural codes of Ukrainians. To achieve this, the following tasks were solved: 1) epithet phrases were detected; 2) epithets within the tropes of the axis of pseudo-identity were analyzed; 3) ethnocultural parameters of epithets in love songs are defined. The object of the research is the artistic speech of family and household lyrics, the subject is the peculiarities of reflecting ethnocultural ideas using the epithet system. The collection “Ukrainian folk songs: family and household lyrics” served as the source base. Usual-associative epithets as permanent epithets of the folklore text represent various ethno-cultural codes of the Ukrainian people recorded in love songs. Such songs are different in subject matter, as they describe girlish beauty, dating, faithful love, jealousy, betrayal, separation, unfaithful love, quarrels, etc. The semantic arsenal of epithets in these songs is insignificant, adjectives with the meaning of color prevail. The spectrum of epithets is quite diverse in form, since different forms of adjectives function within the studied compounds. Epithets acquire a positive connotation due to word-forming affixes that add shades of caressing, gentleness, compassion, solemnity, etc. In the collected and analyzed material, anthropic, floristic, faunonymous and artifactual codes are implemented, based on the epithet as a trope of the axis of pseudo-identity. Anthropic ethno-cultural code is embodied most widely, it covers ideas about girls and boys, formed with the help of coloristic epithets expressed by qualitative adjectives. To a lesser extent, they are in demand in the reproduction of floristic, faunal and artifactual ethnocultural codes.

Мифологические представления и фольклор зимнего оленеводческого праздника Пэгыттын коряков-чавчувенов

The winter reindeer herders’ festival Pegyttyn of Koryaks-Chavchuvens currently is not held. Its authentic existence at the end of the 20th century was recorded on a videotape from the home archive of Nadezhda Kuznetsova (born in 1949 in the Olyutorsky area of the Koryak National District), one of the last carriers of the language and culture of the Chavchuvens of Kamchatka. Traditionally, the celebration was timed to coincide with the appearance of the star Altair from the constellation Pegyttyn and the winter solstice, which symbolize the turn to the revival of nature. In the 20th century among the Koryaks the moon became a reference point in determining the time of the celebration. The article presents mythological ideas about the Supreme Deity for whom deer sacrifices are performed. The author characterizes folklore texts of spells evyanvyn, pronounced before the slaughter in the rite at the family spear poigyn, as well as before the slaughter of a dog and the sacrifice inelvet. The thanksgiving hunting ritual Mynegynyn in the context of Pegyttyn, according to the author, is an evidence of the manifestation of the ancient cult of the constellation associated with the wild deer hunting

О морально-нравственной ценности переводных китайских народных сказок как адаптированных фольклорных текстов для изложений по русскому языку

О морально-нравственной ценности переводных китайских народных сказок как адаптированных фольклорных текстов для изложений по русскому языку

Ways of creation of urban folklore texts

Ways of creation of urban folklore texts

Contact Phenomena in the Field of Language and Traditional Culture of the Slovenes Living in Natisone Valley and Ter Valley (According to the 2022 Field Research)

The paper discusses the interference phenomena in the speech of informants as well as some lexical borrowings in the sphere of traditional spiritual culture. The results are based on the 2022 field research carrying out among Slovene community in the province of Udine (Italy). Special attention is paid to the analysis of cross-border narratives and nicknames associated with the border location of the region. During the field study, it was also possible to record stories about the labor migration of Slovenes to other countries, in particular, to Belgium and Argentina. Inscriptions on tombstones in cemeteries in this region were documented, as well as customs related to memorial days, November 1 and 2, are described in the paper. In conclusion, the transcribed texts are given, including folklore texts (fairy tales), which are interesting due to numerous borrowings from the surrounding Romance languages.

Способы выражения сравнения в ульчском языке

The paper summarizes the mechanisms used in the Ulch language to denote comparison as a broad cognitive category. Referring to numerous studies of various languages, the author examines a variety of possible comparative relations between objects and events and divides them into four types: comparative and superlative (inequality group), equative and simulative (equality group). Each type features a set of linguistic means used to verbalize a specific degree of similarity or superiority, including syntactic constructions, grammatical markers, and lexical units. The analysis has revealed that all four types can be found in the Ulch folklore texts. A conclusion is drawn that the Ulch language lacks a holistic grammatical category of comparison of adjectives or adverbs, resulting in a diverse but economic set of means of expressing comparison. Overall, the comparative mechanisms in Ulch cover the syntactic (two-noun constructions in nominative and instrumental cases in comparative structures or the conjunction umutu/omoto in simulative ones), grammatical (suffixes -achi/machi and mat/mot/meti), and lexical (adverbs of degree: chӯ, tes, badi, ӡin-ӡin, and others) levels. Considerable overlap between equative and similative subtypes has been identified. In addition, the adverbs of degree typically describing superlative relations can also be used in comparative constructions and, in some cases, in constructions describing equality relations. Consideration is also given to the basic components of various comparative structures (objects of comparison, standards, parameters, etc.) for each subtype, highlighting the elements essential for modeling a comparative situation and those that may be included or omitted depending on the context.

Концепт «дом» в фольклорной картине мира монголоязычных народов

Introduction. The article examines a basic concept of any linguistic worldview — that of home (Mong. ger). Goals. The study aims at identifying and revealing semantic features of the concept in folklore texts of Mongolic peoples — Buryat, Kalmyk, and Mongolian paroemias. Methods. Folklore texts are analyzed with the aid of the structural / semantic and structural / typological methods that make it possible to consider different semantic aspects of the concept ger ‘home’. The analysis of Buryat proverbs shows the paroemias characterizing the concept can be divided into two groups: group one to include folklore texts that directly characterize somewhat general meaning of the word ger ‘home’, while group two is compiled from proverbs with an additional meaning manifested through the use of the concept ‘home’ depending on various life situations. Results. The work reveals the image of home — through the prism of proverbs — not only essentially expands its semantic content, but also characterizes specificities of ethnic worldviews inherent to Mongolic peoples, their mentality patterns. Our semantic analysis of Mongolic paroemias with the component ger ‘home’ shows the concept comprises quite a number of semes — from ‘house’, ‘dwelling’, and ‘hearth’ to ‘family’ and even ‘homeland’ (metaphorical meanings). The investigation of Buryat, Kalmyk, and Mongolian proverbs proves instrumental not only in revealing a universal nature of the binary scheme ‘us–them’ in cultural contexts, but also in an attempted characterization of the traditional nomadic worldview through the prism of specific economic and sociocultural activities.