Search

CHULYM TURKS: POPULATION DECREASE AS A RESULT OF ETHNOLINGUISTIC SELF-IDENTITY TRANSFORMATION // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2013. Issue 2 (2). P. 50-55

Chulym Turks are an indigenous people group inhabiting the middle flow of River Chulym in the Tomsk Region and Krasnoyarsk Territory who were officially recognized only in 2000. Some scholars claim the Chulym Turks to be part of the Khakass people, however, this is not considered justified (see works by A. P. Dul’zon, E. L. L’vova etc.) due to this becoming an excessively generalized grouping of ethnic groups detached historically and quite differing linguistically. There are several criteria possibly satisfying the demand for identifying an indigenous group: etymology of (last) names, sociological characteristics, language, etc. Nevertheless, the Chulym Turkic linguistic varieties have never been normalized, the system of writing has not been introduced which strongly hinders the ‘objective’ analysis of the quality of language use among the community. Moreover, the questions on language use in the All-Russian censuses of 2002 and 2010 demanded answers based on the population’s self-estimation only and did not provide a specification of the terms used (especially regarding language). The author suggests that the term native language (Russian родной язык) used in the questionnaire of the censuses actually implies a traditional ethnic language whereas the population’s understanding of the former term makes direct parallels with the original lexeme from which the term native (Russian родной) is derived: a ‘clan, family, kin’. Thus, when claiming the Chulym Turkic language to be a native language the respondent must not necessarily have reflected the language they were fluent at, while their selection of nationality (Russian национальность) may have been the result of preference in favor of this or that community with a strong economic and social motivation. In this light, the author believes that the drastic decrease of the Chulym Turkic population from 656 in 2002 to 355 in 2010 is accounted for the transformation of ethnolinguistic selfidentification rather than any ‘natural’ reasons.

Keywords: Chulym Turks, ethnos, identification, ethnolinguistic self-identity

PROBLEMS OF DETERMINING THE LEXEME’S PHONEMIC INVARIANT WHEN COMPILING A DICTIONARY OF ONE’S MOTHER TONGUE (BASED ON CHULYM TURKIC DATA) // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2014. Issue 4 (6). P. 9-12

The language of the Chulym Turks is local only to some territories of the Tomsk region and the Krasnoyarsk territory. Recent surveys indicate the number of fluent speakers to be under fifteen. Chulym Turkic still bears the status of a colloquial tongue. Several attempts have been made to create a writing system of the language (though the language itself presently consists of two sub-dialects, each with unique phonemic fluctuation). This paper addresses problems occurring at creating methodic materials in Chulym Turkic and, above all, connected with the phonemic variations in the Chulym Turkic language that lead to difficulties in compiling a dictionary of the consultants’ mother tongue (Chulym Turkic). Such variations occur, on the one hand, due to the widespread tendency of phoneme reduction in an unstressed position and at the word end; on the other hand, they occur under the laws of the phoneme alternation range in the conditions of a language system not ultimately formed.

Keywords: the Chulym Turkic language, phonemic invariant, writing system

POSSESSIVE NOUN CONSTRUCTIONS IN TELEUT AND CHULYM-TURKIC // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2015. Issue 4 (10). P. 24-35

The paper gives an analysis of possession manifestations in Teleut and Chulym-Turkic by means of noun constructions. Possessive relations in the focus languages form a functional-semantic field, with a grammar core composed of the third-type ezafe constructions as well as combinations of possessive pronouns and nouns marked with possessive affixes. This marking is discourse-featured and optional in case of the 1st and 2nd person possessor, but inalienable possession is manifested by the regular head marking of the personal pronominal possessive constructions. Also non-ezafe and non-possessive usage of the 3rd person possessive affix is featured, which is presumably affected by its article-like function. On the periphery of the possessiveness functional-semantic field there are adyective affixes *-lɨɣ and *-ɣɨ, which imply the possession of an obyect, quality or a feature, or manifest the idea of their accumulation and concentration.

Keywords: Teleut, Chulym-Turkic, possessiveness, ezafe, personal pronominal possessive constructions, nominal word-formation

EXPRESSING POSSESSION THROUGH PREDICATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS IN CHULYM-TURKIC // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2016. Issue 4 (14). P. 37-42

The article analyzes means of expressing possession relations with constructions not belonging to nominal ones in Chulym Turkic. Based on new field data, examples of predicative possession constructions in use are considered, locational, comitative, topical and transitive possession types are analyzed. It is proven that topical possession constructions in Chulym Turkic also include genitive possession constructions in which the logical subject (i.e. topic) is realized in the form of the possessive case. This very construction is the most frequent one in expressing category of possession through relations of predication in Chulym Turkic.

Keywords: Chulym-Turkic, possession, category of possessiveness, predication

WORD ORDER IN THE LOWER CHULYM DIALECT OF CHULYM-TURKIC: A DIACHRONIC ASPECT // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2020. Issue 4 (30). P. 41-59

The article analyzes the dynamics of word order change in the now extinct moribund non-written Lower Chulym dialect of the Chulym-Turkic language. The article deals with texts collected in the 19–21 centuries, including those recorded by the author. To ensure the representativeness principle for the selected material and in terms of the Lower Chulym text scarcity at different stages, the analysis was carried out on a sample of 20 sentences with a verb predicate for each time period (80 sentences in total). The study concludes that the tendency to preserve the typical Turkic basic word order in a simple sentence with a verb predicate (SOV) is characteristic of texts collected in the 19th and 21st centuries (including translated texts of the early period). The tendency from the middle of the 20th century to change the basic word order towards the one characteristic for Russian (SVO) persisted in the 21st century to a certain extent, however, the overwhelming majority of the simple sentence models in the texts of this period are varieties of the typical Turkic basic word order, SOV. This illustrates the point that even in the conditions of linguistic contacts, active bilingualism and strong influence of the major language, the minority language (in this case, the Lower Chulym dialect) may well retain its syntactic structure.

Keywords: Chulym-Turkic language, Lower Chulym dialect, simple sentence, basic word order, text corpus

SOME LINGUISTIC AND ETHNOGRAPHIC ASPECTS OF THE TOMSK-TATAR KINSHIP AND RITUAL TERMINOLOGY // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2022. Issue 4 (38). P. 48-58

This article deals with a linguistic and ethnographic analysis of the kinship and ritual terminology of the Tomsk Tatars. The Tomsk Tatars are the indigenous population of the Tomsk Ob region, which formed ethnolinguistic groups before the arrival of the Russian-speaking population. The Tomsk Tatars include Kalmaks, Eushtins, and Chats, the latter two groups being grouped in a subdialect – Eushta-Chat. The number of Tomsk Tatars in their traditional places of residence is about 3 thousand people. The article analyzes the data documented during the ethnolinguistic expeditions 2009–2019: Tomsk-Tatar terms divided into lexical-semantic groups in terms of ethnographic classification of family rites (maternity, marriage, burial) and description of family genealogy (terms of kinship). In the course of fieldwork, ethnic stories were recorded, and genealogical schemes were created to identify the family composition and determine family ties within the group and family ties between neighboring villages (responses to family ritual terminology were recorded in both Tatar and Russian). The vocabulary studied refers mainly to the Eushta-Chat subdialect (if so, there is no indication of its origin); if data on the Kalmak subdialect is available, information on their origin is provided. In addition, dialect data from published articles by A. P. Dulzon and R. K. Urazmanova are also given. When it is possible to determine the composition of word forms, a morphological marker is given, a literal translation is also provided, and lexical parallels with the literary Tatar language are copied from open lexicographic sources. The general conclusion of the article is that in the modern kinship and ritual terminology of the Tomsk-Tatar subdialects, there prevail units identical to the literary equivalents, often in a different phonetic form according to the laws of alternation of Turkic phonemes. A number of units do not find parallels with the literary Tatar language, and there are also vocabularies with unclear etymology. Most examples of genealogical terms are direct translations of descriptive terminology from Russian.

Keywords: Tomsk Tatars, Tomsk-Tatar dialects, ritual terms, kinship terms