Article

Name: n the terms denoting the five kinds of livestock in the Oka subdialect of the Buryat language (compared with Mongolian cognates)

Authors: A. V. Mazarchuk

Institute for Linguistic Studies RAS, St. Petersburg, Russian Federation

In the section Лексикология

Abstract:

The article addresses the terms denoting the five kinds of livestock animals of different ages and sex in the Oka subdialect of the Buryat language. The semantics of these terms is compared with that of their Khalkha cognates, paying attention to the Oka and Khalkha livestock naming systems as a whole. The linguistic materials were collected during fieldwork conducted in the Okinsky District of the Republic of Buryatia in 2022. The Oka speakers were found to employ a method of counting the age of an animal that aligns with the traditional Russian approach, which differs from the Mongol tradition of adding the duration of pregnancy to the age of the animal as a year, regardless of the actual length of the pregnancy. As a result, the animals designated as one-year-olds in Oka and two-year-olds in Khalkha, two-year-olds in Oka and three-year-olds in Khalkha, and so on, are essentially of the same age. Moreover, the semantics of certain terms in Oka and Khalkha may not be entirely consistent. For example, the word spelled in Mongolian as teke (from the Old Turkic tekä) means ‘wild goat’ in Khalkha and ‘stud goat’ in Oka. The Oka livestock naming system has fewer terms than the Khalkha system. Consequently, the Khalkha classification of livestock is more detailed. It can be supposed that the reasons for the latter fact may be rooted in the distinctive lifestyle of Oka speakers, which differs considerably from that of Mongols.

Keywords: cattle-breeding vocabulary, Mongolic, Buryat, Oka subdialect, fieldwork

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