Khakass-Mongolian Vocabulary-Correspondence of Kinship Terms

The article is devoted to identifying and describing Khakass-Mongolian lexical correspondences in the field of marital kinship terms. In contrast to kinship terms, the main feature of the content of these terms is “foreignness.” However, since the family is the most valuable mini-society in the traditional perception of Turks and Mongolians, the representatives of marital kinship are conceptualized as ‘their own.’ We conducted a synchroniccomparative and lexical-semantic analysis of six terms of marital kinship. In the analysis, structural-semantic features and the standard and special properties of these terms were identified in each studied language, and their characterological and etymological information was presented. Based on the definition analysis of the dictionary entries, lexical parallels with a completely matching semantic structure / with an incompletely matching semantic structure were identified. A distinctive feature of this vocabulary layer is the branching and overlapping of its meanings (polysemy) and polyfunctionality, which reflects the ethnic uniqueness of people’s mentality, the activity of interaction between the members of an extended family, as well as the transformation processes of family interactions of the members of a mini-community. Although a considerable number of studies deal with kinship terms in the Turkic-Mongolian speech community, a comparative analysis of specifically Khakass-Mongolian material has not yet been conducted. The relevance of our study lies in closing this gap. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the presentation of the occurrence of these terms in these languages, the identification of common and distinct properties, and the identification of cases of semantic syncretism. The work uses descriptive, comparative-typological, lexical-semantic, and definitional methods. The theoretical and methodological basis for the study is the work of famous linguists – typologists: V. Rassadin, A. Burykin, A. Shcherbak, B. Tatarintsev, A. Dybo, N. Dyrenkova, and others. The material for the analysis was collected from bilingual and etymological lexicographical sources. To illustrate the semantic features of some related terms, examples from popular texts and fiction of the Khakass are given. Our study’s results can substantiate the comparative data on the cognates of the Turkic-Mongolian language community.

Khakass language, Mongolian language, cognates, lexical parallels, semantics, comparative aspect