Yakut somatisms denoting elements of the elevated relief (in comparison with other Turkic languages)

This article analyses metaphorical uses of the following somatisms: arghas ‘back’, biil ‘waist’, byar ‘liver’, süreх ‘heart’, tӧbӧ ‘head’, tumus ‘nose, beak’, which denote elements of the elevated relief of the earth’s surface in modern Yakut in comparison with other Turkic languages. The purpose of this article is to identify and describe of orographic terms, formed from somatisms in the Yakut language and to accomplish the following tasks: systematization of somatisms in the orographic terminology of the Yakut language, its classification by thematic groups and comparative analysis of Yakut somatisms, which denote elements of the elevated relief, with the respective these in the Turkic and Mongolian languages. The Yakut orographic vocabulary is considered endangered due to a number of sociolinguistic and socio-economic reasons; there is an urgent need of its collection, systematization, study and preservation in linguistic databases. The research used the method of a lexico-semantic analysis, the comparative method and experimental methods, e.g. elicitation of research data during the field work. The data used in this article have been collected from Yakut dictionaries, databases and written sources as well as obtained from informants during field research trips. Conventionally, we divided the Yakut somatisms used as orographic terms into two groups: 1) lexemes denoting the external parts of the human and animal body; 2) lexemes denoting the internal organs of humans and animals. For the comparative analysis lexicographic sources in the Turkic languages were used. It also showed that the somatic vocabulary in these Turkic languages is largely common. The use of this vocabulary in orographic terms also coincides. At the same time, in these Turkic languages, there are differences in terms of the composition of the metaphorical meanings of the analyzed somatisms. In the Turkic languages, conformity is observed, which are: 1) Сommon-Turkic orographic terms-somatisms; 2) orographic terms-somatisms connecting the Turkic languages of Siberia with the Kypchak. Somatic terms are characteristic of the orographic terminology of Mongolian languages in general, they are also found in the geographical terminology of Manchu-Tungus languages. On this reason, somatisms can be considered as an additional source for understanding the patterns of formation of the orographic terminology of Siberia and its specific features.

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