Yakut Reindeer Breeding Vocabulary (a contrastive aspect)

The paper presents a semantic analysis of the Yakut lexemes expressing reindeers of a certain sex and/or age as compared to the corresponding lexemes in Turkic, Tungusic, and Mongolic languages. The study is based on explanatory, bilingual, and etymological dictionaries of the languages of interest. Descriptive, comparative, and contrastive methods as well as purposive sampling were used. Our research shows that there are two main ways to express a reindeer’s sex and age; one of them is heteronomy, or lexical suppletion, e.g. ньуоҕурхана ‘a four-year-old doe’. This method is characteristic of the respective vocabulary in Tungusic languages. The second method of word formation, known as lexical-syntactic, uses combinations of two or more words: буур таба ‘male deer’, тыһы таба taba ‘female deer’, etc. These combinations have a common origin in Turkic languages and are widely used in the literary Yakut language. The Yakut language uses composite words including the stems meaning ‘male’ or ‘female’ as their first parts; e.g. тыһы ‘female’, атыыр ‘male’ (тыһы үөҥэс ‘a three-year-old female reindeer’, атыыр таба ‘a male reindeer’).

Our analysis has revealed semantic similarities and differences of each lexical unit with the meaning ‘a reindeer of a certain age or sex’ in different Altaic languages. It has turned out that the names of a reindeer’s sex, as well as those used for young animals are of Turkic origin. We have also found some common Altaic stems. Specified age names of male and female reindeers in Yakut dialects are usually regionally restricted and are often words borrowed from Evenki or Even. Further research may involve other Turkic and Mongolic languages in order to study the reindeer vocabulary in both historical and typological perspectives.

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