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HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT AND SEMANTICS OF COLOR TERM AQ ‘WHITE’ IN THE BASHKIR LANGUAGE (AGAINST THE COMMON TURKIC BACKGROUND) // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2020. Issue 1 (27). P. 21-31

The article is devoted to the study of the formation, development, and description of the semantic features of the color term aq ‘white’ in the Bashkir language, which, due to its archaic nature, has a number of nominative and denotative meanings. When studying the origin and evolution of the word, we turned to works on the history of language and etymology. Dictionaries of the Bashkir language and the corpus of Bashkir prose and folklore served as sources of examples for identifying the meanings of a word. A comparative historical study of the meanings of words on a common Türkic background was carried out based on data extracted from the Turkic languages dictionaries. The relevance of the study is due to the need to study the lexeme both in the comparative historical aspect and in terms of synchrony with the identification of general trends and specific features in the development and semantics of the word. The study revealed that the color designation aq is a reflex of the Pre-Turkic form *āk ‘light’, which, in turn, goes back to the Pre-Altai *iāk’V ‘light, white’. The lexeme aq appears already in the earliest written sources - ancient Turkic monuments. In them, aq is mainly used with respect to the suit of a horse, and for the color designation “white” there is the word ürüŋ. It is believed that aq was a word characteristic of the western branch of the Turkic languages and, over time, it became widespread in all Turkic languages after the Chuvash and Yakut branches were separated from them. Most of the meanings of the word aq, identified in the Bashkir language, have a common Türkic character: color and color shades (white, light, gray, gray), secondary meanings (pure, holy, sinless, holy, kind, happy, joyful, noble); substantives (milk, protein, thorn). It assumes the significance of an areal character: old, wise (among the Turks of the Caucasus and Central Asia). In the Bashkir language, there is a white color different from the general Türkic language – ‘southern’, while in ancient times among the Türks it was the west, the western side connotation in white.

Keywords: color term for white, Bashkir language, Tirkic languages, semantics, comparative historical study

COLOR TERM BUÐ ‘GRAY’ IN THE BASHKIR LANGUAGE: HISTORICAL-ETYMOLOGICAL AND LEXICO-SEMANTIC ANALYSIS // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2022. Issue 3 (37). P. 88-96

This article is devoted to the study of the origin, historical development and use of the color designation buδ ‘gray, gray’ in the Bashkir language. For the first time, this word is considered in a wide chronological range: the development of the lexeme from the origin of the word to the current state is traced. The etymology of the word is based on the works of scientists, in which ancient forms are restored, the evolution of the word meanings can be traced through written sources starting from the ancient Turkic period. The relevance of the study is due to the lack of a comprehensive research on the origin, development and functioning of this lexeme in the Turkic languages. The study revealed that the lexeme buδ goes back to the Proto-Turkic *boŕ ‘gray’, which, in turn, came from the Proto-Altaic *boŕV ‘gray’. It was found that in the Bashkir language the main semantic load of the word buδ is the designation of the color of the gray hair and the color of animals and birds. But nevertheless, the material from the text corpus shows that in the modern Bashkir language the word buδ has expanded its semantics and has meanings of ‘light gray’, ‘light ash’, ‘earthy gray’, ‘empty’, ‘desert’, ‘young’, ‘free’, ‘carefree’, ‘lonely’. Color designation can be combined with the names of a wide range of objects: animals, somatisms, botanical terms, names of rocks and minerals, sky and celestial bodies, landscape, abstract concepts.

Keywords: color naming of gray, Bashkir language, Turkic languages, semantics, comparative historical research