Desemantization of the Old Turkic khan, baj, beg in the modern Kazakh anthroponyms

Abstract

The lexemes khan, bai, bek of Old Turkic origin are frequent components in modern Kazakh masculine name compounds such as Abilkhan, Adilbek, Kumisbay, etc. During centuries of development with the aforementioned Old Turkic common words denoting a person’s high social, class and material status in Kazakh society, various semantic changes took place. Of particular interest to us
are the processes that take place in their semantics when they function as part of the complex masculine name composites. The most important factor that has influenced the dynamics of semantic processes in these words is an extra-linguistic factor: a change in the socio-economic structure of Kazakh society that led to the loss of statuses, titles and ranks. As a result, the old Turkish nouns became historicisms, which lost their referential and thus also part of their denotative meaning. The second, purely linguistic
factor was the semantic-grammatical nature of the first component of the compound name, which also significantly determined the processes in the semantics of the Old Turkic elements. Thus, in the complex two-part names with the first component – the name of a person according to a certain parameter – there is an additional desemanticisation of the Old Turkic elements due to the semantic redundancy (the repetition of the sem «person»), for example: Zholdaskhan, Dosbay. In combination with the animal names, these elements actualise the semes ‘man’, ‘baby’, ‘male’, having an identifying rather than a nominative function and therefore becoming a unit of the transitional type affixoid. In combination with the toponyms, numerals and adjectives, the old Turkic elements are desemanticised, undergo the process of affixoidisation and now function as signs for the name of a male person. The desemanticisation of the listed Old Turkic elements contributed to their preservation in the active fundus of the Kazakh language in a new, identifying function as part of complex anthroponyms.