Scholarly record

COLOUR TERMS OF WHITE IN THE NARYM AND TAZ DIALECTS OF THE SELKUP LANGUAGE

N. Dubrovskaya

Abstract

The relevance of the study is determined by several reasons. Firstly, the languages of the indigenous peoples of Siberia belong to the category of languages that do not have an ancient written tradition, and the texts of these peoples present a valuable linguistic material that allows to obtain important data, as well as to draw significant conclusions about the specifics of the genesis of linguistic and cultural processes of the relevant ethnic groups. Secondly, in recent years there has been a certain increase in the field of the lexical systems’ research of the aboriginal languages of Siberia in connection with the typological problems. However, up to the present time, no attempts to undertake a special study of the colour terms of the minor peoples of Siberia according to the unified methodology have been made. It is also true to the Selkup language, which belongs to the Samoyed branch of the Uralic languages and may be regarded as a set of dialects. On the material of prose folklore texts, as well as archive and lexicographical works on the Taz and Narym dialects of Selkup, an attempt to describe the semantic category of “white” is made. It is necessary to mention that the lack of texts in these unwritten dialects is evident. And that is why, the study was impossible without the creation of the set of necessary materials to interview the informants. Thus, the lexicotypological questionnaires on the basis of the frame theory (E. Rakhilina) (see [1]) were composed. It allowed us to obtain about 1000 separate sentences with colour terms and 170 texts in the Narym dialect of the unwritten Selkup language (the total number of lexical units of the new text corpora is more than 11,000). The analyses of date allowed as to distinguish four term for white in the Taz and Narym dialect. Colour terms s?ry in the Taz dialect and cag in the Narym dialect should be determined as basic ones. The method of investigation of the colour terms is based on the analyses of their compatibility. The constructions with the colour terms are put into comparative tables, which reflect the semantics of the same items in the Taz and Narym dialects of the Selkup language, attributed by the colour terms of white.

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