Orographic Appellatives of High Relief in Yakut Oronymy

The article analyzes the orographic appellatives of high relief on the material of Yakut oronymy in a comparative aspect with Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungus languages. The author examines their semantics and distribution. In addition, their role in the formation of oronyms is determined. The research material comes mainly from bilingual, lexicographic, etymological, dialectological, and toponymic dictionaries and linguistic works containing information on orographic appellatives. The study also used material collected by the author during the field expeditions conducted in the central regions of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) since 2020. The article aims to identify the orographic appellatives of the high relief in Yakut oronymy and to describe them comparatively historically. Nowadays, such a specific layer of the Yakut toponymic vocabulary as oronymy is considered endangered for a number of sociolinguistic and socioeconomic reasons and needs collection, systematization, study, and preservation in linguistic databases. The result of the descriptive method shows that the orographic appellatives occurring in Yakut oronymy reflect the physical and geographical features of the terrain in which they function. The statistical method has shown that high relief appellatives account for about 27% of all Yakut oronyms. The most active in forming oronyms are the appellatives haya ‘mountain, rock’ (20%), bulgunniakh ‘pingo’ (19%), taas ‘rock, mountain’ (7%), tumul ‘cape’ (7%). The word formation structure of most of the Yakut oronyms with appellatives of high relief is represented by two-word attributive constructions and is formed according to models such as “noun + noun” and “adjective + noun”. The comparative historical method has shown that the orographic appellatives of high relief in Yakut oronymy are represented by Turkic, Mongolian, Manchu-Tungusic, as well as common Altaic word stems. The etymological analysis of the appellatives denoting different forms of relief allows us to deepen and broaden the study of the genetic relationship of the Altai languages and the ways of their historical development. Some appellatives of high relief are in the stage of their formation, and others are well established and exist in many Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungus languages.

Yakut language, oronymy, oronyms, orographic appellatives, high relief