COLOR TERM BUÐ ‘GRAY’ IN THE BASHKIR LANGUAGE: HISTORICAL-ETYMOLOGICAL AND LEXICO-SEMANTIC ANALYSIS

This article is devoted to the study of the origin, historical development and use of the color designation buδ ‘gray, gray’ in the Bashkir language. For the first time, this word is considered in a wide chronological range: the development of the lexeme from the origin of the word to the current state is traced. The etymology of the word is based on the works of scientists, in which ancient forms are restored, the evolution of the word meanings can be traced through written sources starting from the ancient Turkic period. The relevance of the study is due to the lack of a comprehensive research on the origin, development and functioning of this lexeme in the Turkic languages. The study revealed that the lexeme buδ goes back to the Proto-Turkic *boŕ ‘gray’, which, in turn, came from the Proto-Altaic *boŕV ‘gray’. It was found that in the Bashkir language the main semantic load of the word buδ is the designation of the color of the gray hair and the color of animals and birds. But nevertheless, the material from the text corpus shows that in the modern Bashkir language the word buδ has expanded its semantics and has meanings of ‘light gray’, ‘light ash’, ‘earthy gray’, ‘empty’, ‘desert’, ‘young’, ‘free’, ‘carefree’, ‘lonely’. Color designation can be combined with the names of a wide range of objects: animals, somatisms, botanical terms, names of rocks and minerals, sky and celestial bodies, landscape, abstract concepts.

color naming of gray, Bashkir language, Turkic languages, semantics, comparative historical research