Lexicon of Traditional Food in the Poetry of A.E. Kulakovsky: Composition, Semantics, and Artistic Functions

The relevance of this study is determined by the insufficient exploration of the gastronomic vocabulary of the Yakut language as an essential layer of the material and spiritual culture of the Sakha people. In the context of globalization and the unification of food traditions, particular value is attached to the systematic description of the names of traditional products recorded in written monuments and literary texts, which reflect archaic ideas about food, methods of its preparation, and symbolic meaning. The aim of the work is to identify, thematically classify, and linguoculturologically analyze the corpus of names of traditional Yakut products presented in the works of the founder of Yakut literature, A.E. Kulakovsky. The objectives include:

1) a continuous sampling of lexemes from the collection Yrya-khohoon; 2) thematic distribution of the identified units into groups (dairy, meat, fish, flour products, wild plants); 3) semantic analysis of each group using data from explanatory dictionaries; 4) identification of artistic techniques (epithets, parallelism, sound symbolism) used by the poet to introduce gastronomic vocabulary. The methodology is based on methods of continuous sampling, componential analysis, comparative-dictionary and linguoculturological analysis, as well as techniques of ethnolinguistic interpretation. The material used was the collection Yrya-khohoon (vol. 1 of the Complete Works, 2009) and Yakut-Russian dictionaries (E.K. Pekarsky, Great Explanatory Dictionary of the Yakut Language, Yakut-Russian Dictionary, ). The results showed that the gastronomic vocabulary in Kulakovsky’s works comprises more than 40 names belonging to five thematic groups; dairy terms dominate (over 50% of the sample), which reflects their key role in the traditional diet. Semantic analysis shows that the names are often motivated by the method of preparation, consistency, or seasonality of the product. Artistic techniques (elaborate epithets for the word kumys, syntactic parallelism in listing fish dishes, sound symbolism in describing utensils) not only enrich the poetics but also serve as a means of actualizing cultural memory. Discussion of the results allows us to conclude that Kulakovsky’s gastronomic vocabulary is a semantic core organizing poetic descriptions of everyday life, celebration, abundance, and social relations. Prospects for the study are related to expanding the corpus through dialect records, olonkho, and other texts, as well as to an in-depth etymological analysis against the Turkic and Mongolian background.

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