Archetypes Of The Bashkir Language: Historical Aspects

Abstract

Significant achievements in the field of Turkic studies were made in recent years. The research was carried out to study the grammatical structure of living and dead Turkic languages, bilingual and multilingual explanatory dictionaries were created, separate ancient Turkic and Old Turkic dictionaries were published, written monuments, dialects and subdialects of individual languages were studied. The research on comparative historical study of phonetics, morphology and syntax of the Turkic languages is being conducted. All these aspects make it possible to use these achievements in the solution of specific problems of separately taken Turkic languages. Etymological analysis is a retrospective diachronic analysis, which consists in the identification of the phenomena inherent in a later period of language development and later of earlier stages of its development. Despite the fact that Bashkir scientists have studied the issues of historical phonetics, morphology and vocabulary, and there are also experiments in the etymologization of individual lexemes, an etymological dictionary of the Bashkir language has not yet been created. All these aspects lead to the urgent need to generalize the positive experience accumulated in the Turkological literature on etymological analysis, further test of various hypotheses and new searches to resolve the controversial problems of Turkology. Our research is carried out in accordance with the solution of this linguistic problem.

Keywords: ArchetypedictionaryetymologylinguisticsreconstructionTurkology

Introduction

Significant achievements in the field of Turkic studies were made in recent years. The research was carried out to study the grammatical structure of living and dead Turkic languages, bilingual and multilingual explanatory dictionaries were created, separate ancient Turkic and Old Turkic dictionaries were published, written monuments, dialects and subdialects of individual languages were studied. The research on comparative historical study of phonetics, morphology and syntax of the Turkic languages is being conducted. All these aspects make it possible to use these achievements in the solution of specific problems of separately taken Turkic languages.

Problem Statement

The relevance of the research is determined by a number of circumstances:

• Currently existing etymological dictionaries of the Turkic languages do not cover the entire original Turkic vocabulary, which requires an etymological interpretation;

• “Etymological Dictionary of Turkic Languages” by Sevortyan (1978), according to the plan of the compilers, was supposed to cover the main part of the common Turkic and inter-Turkic vocabulary. However, it examines the etymology of words characteristic of only one or two languages. Meanwhile, there are a lot of words specific to a particular language, which is proved through the comparison of such close and constantly contacting languages as Bashkir and Tatar;

• It is necessary to develop etymological dictionaries of individual Turkic languages, since each of them contains a significant number of specific words that have not listed and will not be included in the dictionaries of the Turkic languages covering the common Turkic and a certain part of the inter-Turkic vocabulary;

• The topic may be interesting to some extent to researchers of other Turkic languages, especially the languages of the Kypchak group;

• The archetypes of a significant part of the words included in the etymological dictionaries of different authors do not coincide and this circumstance requires the continuation of the search for truth;

• Despite the fact that Bashkir scientists have studied the issues of historical phonetics, morphology and vocabulary and there are also experiments in the etymologization of individual lexemes, an etymological dictionary of the Bashkir language has not yet been created.

Research Questions

The problem of the study of etymology is one of the most complex problems of linguistics. Thus, with the purpose of objective study of the linguistic material the following dictionaries appeared: the etymological dictionaries of the Turkic languages by Ryasyanen (1969) and Kloson (1972) the multivolume etymological dictionary of the Turkic languages by Sevortyan (1978), Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language by Fasmer (2004), Etymological Dictionary of the Chuvash Language by Egorov (1964), A Brief Etymological Dictionary of the Kazakh Language (Yskakov et al., 1966), Etymological Dictionary of the Chuvash Language by Fedotov (1996), A Brief Historical and Etymological Dictionary of the Tatar Language by Akhmetyanov (2001), Etymological Dictionary of Turkic Languages (Etymological Dictionary of Turkic Languages: Common Turkic and Inter-Turkic Lexical Foundations on the Letters "L", "M", "N", "P", "S", 2003), Etymological Dictionary of Tuvan language by Tatarintsev (2000), Historical and etymological toponymic dictionary of the Bashkir language by Kamalov and Kamalova (2007). These works made a significant contribution to the development of the Turkic-speaking etymology. Despite the fact that Bashkir scientists have studied the issues of historical phonetics, morphology and vocabulary, and there are also experiments in the etymologization of individual lexemes, an etymological dictionary of the Bashkir language has not yet been created. All these aspects lead to the urgent need to generalize the positive experience accumulated in the Turkological literature on etymological analysis, further test of various hypotheses and new searches to resolve the controversial problems of Turkology. Our research is carried out in accordance with the solution of this linguistic problem.

Purpose of the Study

Etymological analysis is a retrospective diachronic analysis, which consists in the identification of the phenomena inherent in a later period of language development and later of earlier stages of its development.

The meanings of words, as the history of the development of any language shows, do not remain unchanged. There are frequent cases when the initial meanings of words can disappear from a particular language, and one of the tasks of etymological research is to reconstruct them. At the same time, there are also cases when, from the point of view of specific native speakers, individual words can be perceived as not related to each other, but during the study of the history of these words, they turn out to be one-root or even etymologically common words.

Research Methods

The subject of the research is the establishment of the principles and methods of etymologization of words in the Bashkir language. The expansion of the dictionary of any language can be performed in the following ways:

• The emergence of new words from words available in a given language;

• The formation of onomatopoeic or imaginative words;

• Borrowing words from other languages.

Imitative words, as a rule, do not require an etymological explanation. The main criteria to determine borrowing are as follows:

• unusual phonetic structure;

• the presence in the word of derivational elements unusual for the given language;

• the presence of a large number of one-root words in the contacting language;

• the absence of a word in other Turkic languages.

Although these criteria are not reliable enough due to the fact that native speakers often change the phonetic form of the borrowed word that it is not always possible to detect unusual derivational elements. However most of the borrowings can be determined. Consequently, the etymological analysis is practically reduced to the search for a word from which the studied word could originate with the help of one or another method of word formation available in the language at a given period of its linguistic evolution.

Findings

The main difficulty of the etymological analysis of the Turkic vocabulary lies in the instability of the phonetic system inherent in all Turkic languages.

Another difficulty is semantic shifts, which often lead to a complete loss of connection between the generating stem and the derived word.

Etymological analysis is impossible without the data of comparative-historical phonetics and morphology and in some cases also the comparative-historical syntax of related languages, because phonetic proximity or morphological similarity of any words in modern Turkic languages ​​is not in all cases a consequence of their common origin. In the language, there are often such cases when any similarity between words is completely absent. However, comparative historical analysis confirms the unity of their origin.

The replenishment of the vocabulary fund of languages ​​is not a one-time act. The development of language, like any phenomenon, occurs through the struggle of opposites, the transition of quantitative changes to qualitative ones. Strict consideration of the dialectics of the individual and the general, form and content, internal and external contradictions of linguistic evolution, the recognition of qualitative stages in the development of a language is indispensable condition for any linguistic research.

The difficulty of etymological analysis lies in the fact that a researcher often has to refer to the earliest periods of linguistic evolution, when it is possible to speak about many phenomena of the phonetic, morphological and syntactic development of languages in the preliterate period only tentatively.

In this regard, one of the unclear issues of Turkology is the question of the composition of the most ancient etymological dictionaries. An etymological dictionary should be considered indivisible if its decomposition by the methods of modern linguistic analysis turns out to be impossible, since it leads to the destruction of semantics. As it is known, the ultimate purpose of etymological research is the definition of the generating basis with the establishment of its semantics and morpho-phonetic structure. However, the methodology for the determination of the primary foundations, the approach to the study of etymology, the assessment of the quality of the initial and final sounds in different authors do not coincide, which causes different reconstructions of the same common Turkic foundations, reducing the scientific value of research.

All this causes an urgent need to generalize the positive experience accumulated in the Turkological literature on etymological analysis, further test of various hypotheses and new searches to resolve the controversial problems of Turkology.

We hope that our research will contribute to the solution of these problems.

The purpose of the research is the establishment of the techniques and methods of etymologization of the original Bashkir vocabulary, which is absent in existing etymological dictionaries. The realization of this purpose involves the solution of the following tasks:

• to use the data of comparative historical phonetics and morphology, taking into account the patterns of semantic changes, to carry out a retrospective analysis of the studied word and identify its primary basis and word-forming elements;

• to try to identify opportunities for the definition of etymologically unstudied and poorly understood words.

The etymological studies of borrowings are possible only if there is doubt about their foreign language origin. The establishment of the source of early borrowings in the Turkic languages ​​presents considerable difficulty due to the numerous contacts of the Turkic languages ​​with other languages.

It is possible to find many common Turkic words that have phonetic and semantic similarity with the Mongolian, Finno-Ugric and Indo-European languages. Sometimes they may be accidental coincidences; they may also be borrowings from the pre-literary period. However, it is not always possible to determine whether they are borrowed by the Turkic languages ​​or, on the contrary, from the Turkic languages into other languages.

Etymological analysis is a retrospective diachronic analysis, which consists in the identification of the phenomena inherent in a later period of language development and later of earlier stages of its development.

The meanings of words, as the history of the development of any language shows, do not remain unchanged. There are frequent cases when the initial meanings of words can disappear from a particular also cases when, from the point of view of specific native speakers, individual words can be perceived as not related to each other, but during the study of the history of these words, they turn out to be one-root or even etymologically common words.

The main provisions and conclusions of the research were presented in the publications and the reports of the authors at international, all-Russian, regional scientific and practical conferences, including: Akmanova (2008); Akmanova (2010). The results of the research can be used in the future and included in monograph.

The etymologies suggested in existing dictionaries do not coincide in many cases. Unresolved problems of historical phonetics and morphology lead to different reconstruction of archetypes. New searches are needed to practically solve the problem of the development of new etymological dictionaries of individual Turkic languages, taking into account that even when a complete dictionary of Turkic languages appears in it, naturally, the specific words characteristic of each national language can not be found in it.

The creation of etymological dictionaries is impossible without obligatory consideration of the data of comparative-historical phonetics and morphology, peculiarities of semantic development in the Turkic languages, taking into account numerous contacts with Indo-European, Uralic and other languages.

During the creation of etymological dictionaries, a significant part of the nominal and verbal stems that can not be divided by the methods of linguistic analysis must be taken as initial ones, explaining the origin of other words from these primary stems.

The analysis of the composition of the early Turkic nominal bases suggests that the ancient Turks had a fairly wide range of concepts about nature and the place of man in it. The words that denote many wild and domestic animals, birds, plants, trees are primordial in the Turkic languages. Some of these words were borrowed by Indo-European, Uralic, and other languages. The Turks used words of primordial origin to express various actions and states of a person, seasons, spatial phenomena, such as consciousness, memory, feeling, freedom. They were aware of reading and writing.

The derivatives of the base, denoting metals such as copper, gold, tin were not borrowed. The wide spread of cattle breeding among the ancient Turks was explained by the abundance of non-borrowed cattle-breeding terms. The ancient Turks were well aware of horses, deer sheep and poultry. They were probably partially familiar with agriculture, since the original Turkic word denoted sowing and crops.

Despite the coincidence of the basic word-formation models in ancient and modern languages, the etymology of a certain part of the Turkic lexicon presents a significant difficulty. It is explained by the instability of the phonetic system of the Turkic languages, which generates regular and sporadic changes in phonemes, contributing to the emergence of homonyms, homoforms in languages, some of which occur in overlapping semantic fields. This, naturally, makes it difficult to define the archetype and its semantic meaning, being one of the main reasons for the discrepancies in etymologies proposed by different authors. These objective difficulties of etymological analysis are complicated by the unsolved problems of comparative-historical phonetics and morphology.

First of all, the following should be noted among these problems:

• The problem of the presence of voiceless and voiced consonants in the early Turkic period in various positions of the word has not been solved. Numerous facts support the opinion that voiceless and voiced consonants existed in different periods of the development of the Turkic languages. The recognition of this fact most often explains why words homonymic in some languages do not turn out to be so in others.

• Uniform definitions of archaism and innovation have not been established.

• It is necessary to carry out a thorough study of all early Turkic primary foundations in order to identify all types o common Turkic etymological dictionary. In the course of our research, we came to the conclusion that the main types of the common Turkic root word are the following: SG, GS, SGS. It was not possible to fully resolve the issue of the existence of a root word such as SGSS and GSS. These findings require further verification. We believe that the opinion of some authors about the existence of one and only type of root word in the common Turkic period is controversial, since the common Turkic period is the result of a long prehistoric stage in the evolution of the language and the synchronous study of any language shows that there are different types of bases in any of the existing languages. The most ancient root words are primary foundations, indivisible from the point of view of modern science, formed in the prehistoric era through the action of phonetic processes, unknown morphological and syntactic phenomena.

• The problem of the origin of the initial “j” has not been solved: first, whether it was primary whether it was formed by the convergence of different sounds or arose from some other sound. According to the opinion of the majority of scholars, we believe that in the general Turkic period there existed the initial sound “j”.

The instability of the phonetic system is also characteristic of modern Turkic languages. It causes the appearance of several phonetic variants of an etymologically common word in dialects of one language.

Along with the instability of the phonetic system, the complexity of semantic reconstructions of the archetypes of the Bashkir vocabulary is generated by the abundance of homonyms of primary bases, the vagueness of some particular circumstances of the naming, and correlative changes in meanings.

Nouns and adjectives in most cases acquire new meanings through metaphorization, changes in meanings based on similarity of functions or metanomical changes in meanings. There are also substantivation, adjectivation and adverbalization.

Peculiar phenomena of semantic development can be characteristic of the etymologization of words of individual lexical-semantic groups.

In our opinion, in the semantic reconstruction of archetypes it is expedient to use the typological approach along with the comparative historical research method.

Some Turkic numerals, the names of animals and plants appeared lexico-semantically.

The method of reduplication remains a comparatively productive way of word formation in the Turkic languages. The presence of this approach of word formation in all Turkic languages shows the deep antiquity of this phenomenon.

The reconstruction of word-formation of the archetypes of words that have occurred morphologically is, first of all, complicated by the lack of consensus among Turkologists about the phonetic composition of the most ancient etymological dictionary. Although the dominant position among the primary stems is occupied by the CGS type, it is possible that the final sound of the primary stem in certain cases may be a derivational affix merged with the root. Derivational reconstruction of archetypes is complicated by the phenomena of fusion, contamination of bases and the absence of a number of productive bases in modern languages.

Conclusion

Although morphological word formation has retained many features characteristic of ancient languages, many morphemes are currently unproductive, which makes it difficult to reveal their semantic content.

At the same time, the preservation of many phenomena characteristic of the past in modern Turkic languages, in their dialects and subdialects, gives great opportunities for the comparison of modern phenomena with the past to detect the errors in etymologies and for direct etymological research.

However, the establishment of the reliability of all etymologies at the current level of development of comparative historical research is hardly possible, due to the above mentioned unresolved problems.

This requires the introduction of such a criterion as the degree of probability of the proposed etymology.

Further progress in etymological research is possible only with the successful development of historical phonetics and morphology and the deep study of the patterns of semantic development.

Only the study of the language as a system in which all its elements closely interact, the study of the patterns of interaction of the target language with other related and unrelated languages, as well as the consideration of extralinguistic factors, will allow avoiding mistakes in the reconstruction of archetypes and the establishment of reliable etymologies.

References

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