Mongolian Borrowings in the Text of the Khakass Heroic Legend “Албынчы”

Like other Siberian Turkic languages, the Khakass language is characterized by an abundance of Mongolian borrowings due to the centuries-long contacts of its speakers. In the texts of the heroic stories, most of these words have been preserved, even those that are no longer actively used. Based on the semantic, morphological, phonetic, and etymological criteria for selecting the Mongolian loan vocabulary described in the works of famous linguists – typologists E. V. Sevortyan, V. I. Rassadin, B. I. Tatarintsev, A. V. Dybo, and others – we have managed to identify Mongols in the text of the Khakass heroic legend “Албынчы”. However, the question of the Mongolian origin of some of them is still open. This article analyzes the nine most frequent lexemes in the language of the heroic sagas from the functional-semantic, etymological, and comparative points of view, of which four lexemes are used in the modern Khakass language in a somewhat modified semantic version. Translation examples of Mongolian borrowings from the heroic legend “Албынчы” served as material for the article, for the analysis of which data from lexicographic sources were used. It turned out that all the Mongolian borrowings we considered exist not only in the Khakass language but also in other Siberian Turkic languages and the Kyrgyz language. However, if some of these words are preserved only in the Khakass texts of the heroic legends and in the Khakas-Russian dictionary [2006], then their equivalents are used in the active vocabulary of other languages, for example, арға “1) strength, dexterity; 2) method, means, reception”. It has also been noted that polysemantic Mongolian words have generally passed into the Khakass language (and other Siberian Turkic languages, as well as the Kyrgyz language) only in their primary meanings; some of them have developed figurative meanings in the modern Khakass language, e.g., хуйах “protection; intuition” In the semantic-functional scheme, sentences with Mongols are not characterized by a particular variety of syntactic links, as active clichéd expressions are built into them. Also, the semantics and phonetic appearance of the considered mongolisms in the Khakass language do not show significant changes.

Khakass language, Mongolian borrowings, lexeme, etymology, semantics, functioning