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BASIC BINARY CONCEPTS AS FRAGMENTS OF THE LANGUAGE PICTURE OF THE YAKUTS’ WORLD // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2017. Issue 3 (17). P. 21-30

The article focuses on the basic binary concepts LIFE / DEATH, GOOD / EVIL, OWN / ALIEN in the Yakut language. The aim of the study is to identify and describe the conceptual features that form the structure of basic binary oppositions in the Yakut language picture of the world. Conceptual analysis has allowed to identify and describe a set of differential signs of these oppositions as fragments of the language picture of the world. Further study of binary oppositions is seen in the identification of their linguistic representation on the material of folklore, art texts and other Turkic languages.

Keywords: Yakut language, a сoncept, binary opposition, conceptual analysis, a language picture of the world

A TRAID OF WORLDS IN THE SEMANTICS OF THEIR INHABITANTS’ CLOTHING (ON THE DATA OF THE OLONKHO “NYURGUN BOOTUR THE SWIFT” P. A. OYUNSKY) // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2018. Issue 4 (22). P. 86-97

The problem of the trinity in the world as the focus of the Universe, in particular, in the context of epic works, often touched upon in research, in the center of which is the text of the Olonkho – one of the oldest genres of the oral creativity of the Sakha people. The article is discussed the traditional clothing of the Sakha based on the text of the heroic epic Olonkho. The authors focuses on identifying and describing the Olonkho characters, representatives of the three worlds – Upper, Middle and Lower. According to the Yakut mythology, the Universe consisted of three worlds - the Upper, Middle and Lower, located one above the other or floors above one another. In the Middle World, defined implied as the center of the Universe, but it does not have its own, there living people. Here live animals and a variety of supernatural beings. In other worlds live supernatural nature-spirits. As the researchers write, any description of clothes in Olonkho is no accidental, that the clothes of the epic Olonkho can be regarded as a kind of ethnic sign, based on the traditional worldview and conduct of the Yakut people, that common genetic traits with the vast Turkic-Mongolian world have survived, the Yakut ethnos developed many common mythological ideas, rituals, developed a unique, characteristic only to the Yakuts, ways of symbolizing the world, that clothing carries a special sacral ritual function, that form, decoration and symbol of the products of traditional Yakut folk art show a significant influence on the formation of the foundations of the Yakut material and spiritual culture of both local and North American Paleoasians and ancient culture of the nomads of Eurasia. It is established that the text of this Olonkho contains a detailed description of the headdress and its details, types of outerwear (fur coats, coats, etc.) and shoes, which reflects the idea of the inhabitants of the three worlds. In this regard, the epic text serves as a kind of source of reconstruction of the coded informative material. The function of clothing as an indicator of the social status, financial position of its owner is identified. The problem of description considered in this article as part of the traditional Sakha culture in the context of the epic text correlates with the study of the question of who and how works in the simulated space.

Keywords: epic; text of the Olonkho; three worlds; clothes; semantics; function; material and spiritual culture

FROM THE DEPTHS OF ANTIQUITY: THE HISTORY OF THE "HOTODOOH SON" // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2020. Issue 1 (27). P. 137-150

The article attempts to describe the history of an archaic look of an old Yakut fur coat in terms of its functional purpose and syncretic social stratification. The bird wings depicted on the back of the fur coat are of particular importance that also serves as a justification for naming this type of outerwear as “hotodooh son” (a fur coat with an eagle). The retrospective is based on data from early and late sources and allows us to express an assumption about the appearance of such a fur coat approximately at the end of the 17th century – the beginning of the 18thcentury. There is a hypothesis about its southern origin, so that we indicate the factors that determined the tendency of its gradual modification in northern conditions. Realization of the task requires the use of an integrated approach involving data from ethnography, art history, cultural studies, technology, and design of clothing, linguistics, for which the authors summarized the available resources studying traditional Yakut clothing, which also includes this coat. After analyzing a number of works on this topic, a preliminary conclusion can be made: the authors of publications believe that the symbolic marking of an ornithomorphic image on a fur coat is a sign of the totem as the ancestor of the social group of kangalans. However, there are some articles that do not set the task of interpreting the hidden meaning depicted on the back of a fur coat - they consider it, first of all, from utilitarian functional purpose. The attention of the authors of this article is focused on an attempt to read the information incorporated both in the name of the fur coat and the symbol in the wings. According to the authors, the story of “hotodooh son” is fraught with many valuable facts for those who are interested in the history of the Yakut people as a whole.

Keywords: Yakut ancient coat, museum, material culture, eagle totem, Yakuts, shaman, outerwear

Socio-Cultural Aspect of Gender Marking of Phraseological Units in the Yakut Language // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2024. Issue 1 (43). P. 20-31

In the anthropocentric paradigm, the human being as a native speaker, as a representative of a particular culture, is at the center of modern linguistics. This formulation of the object of research requires a new approach, and other methods of its cognition, which take into account the role of the human factor in language, which determines the formation of the internal content of linguistic units and their decoding. In this work, the anthropocentric approach implies the principle of studying a person in a language, namely a person in the phraseological units of the Yakut language. The aspect of gender is relevant to the study of a person when considering the semantic features of naming men and women as components of phraseological units. The phraseological units of the Yakut language have not yet been studied under the aspect of gender. This work is the first attempt to identify from the set of phraseological units those expressions that contain the names of men/women and which come from the phraseographic and lexicographic dictionaries of the Yakut language. It turns out that a large number of phraseological units contain as a component the naming of the person ‘kihi’, whose gender identification is possible only based on the broad context, so in this work the interpretation of the values of most of the units is supported by examples from artworks or periodical. The difficulty in reading units with gendered semantics is due to the lack of a grammatical category for the gender of nouns denoting a person in the Yakut language. The study involved a systematization of the gender-marked units, i.e. the component denoting a person of male and/or female gender or marking the domain of their profession or social status, and a definition of the qualitative features established in the figurative bases of these units as signs with culturally significant information. The units labeled diakhtar “woman” and the areas in which they occur, despite their small number, reveal the theme of morality, especially as a violation of the norm for women’s behavior in this society. The phraseological units labeled er kihi “man” and the sphere in which he acts mainly reflect the description of his external features as well as the condemnation of the manifestations of his behavior in society.

Keywords: phraseological units, Yakut language, gender, socio-culture, image of human