Aleksey Kulakovsky’s dialectological material: lexical-semantic, phonetic analysis

Abstract

Aleksey Kulakovsky, one of the prominent representatives of the Yakut intelligentsia of the early 20th century, the founder of Yakut literature, a prominent thinker, public figure, and versatile scientist, traveled through the uluses and districts of his native region and collected a wealth of dialectological material on the Yakut language. His work consists of 20 sections, which include approximately 760 words from Yakut dialects, along with their translations into the “Tattyn dialect”. This article examines this significant body of factual material on dialect vocabulary: “Dialects of various localities, uluses, and districts, with the addition of archaisms, special hunting terms, homonyms, and synonyms (about 760 words)”. The aim of the research is to systematize and conduct an in-depth study of Kulakovsky’s dialectological material. To achieve this aim, the following objectives are addressed: to divide the collected dialects by theme into lexico-semantic groups, to determine their origin, to establish the methods of formation of lexical dialectisms, and to identify the variations of phonetic dialectisms. In the course of the work, a structural research method was used, in particular, the method of semantic field and distributional analysis. Lexical-semantic groups related to the environment, cattle breeding, reindeer breeding, hunting, fishing, food, clothing, animals, parts of the human body, and animal qualities have been identified. Native Yakut words, words of Evenki (Even) origin, and words borrowed from the Russian language were established based on the origin of dialectalisms. The article identifies affixal and non-affixal (lexical-semantic, lexical-morphological, lexical-syntactic) methods of word formation of lexical dialectisms. It also identifies types of phonetic dialectisms with variations in vowel and consonant sounds. The results of the study can be used in the teaching of vocabulary and phonetics of the Yakut language and Yakut dialectology.