The semantics of polysemous words in a Turkic cyrillic written monument

Abstract

This article examines polysemous lexical units in the Kyrgyz–Russian Dictionary, a 19th-century lexicographic monument written in Cyrillic. Unlike many other peoples, Turkic peoples have employed a variety of writing systems throughout their written history. Among these, forms of the Arabic script were used for several centuries. Numerous encyclopedic, literary, historical, chronological, natural-scientific, and linguistic written monuments of the Turkic peoples were produced in the Arabic script. However, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, historical and sociopolitical developments led Turkic peoples to gradually adopt the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. The Russian Empire promoted the transition of Turkic peoples to the Cyrillic script, relying in part on the educated population. In the Kazakh steppe, representatives of the Kazakh intelligentsia contributed to this process by promoting literacy and education and disseminating literary and religious texts, self-study manuals, and dictionaries. One such publication was the Kyrgyz–Russian Dictionary, published in two editions, in 1897 and 1903. The dictionary is a unique lexicographic monument in which linguistic information and cultural knowledge are closely intertwined, reflecting the traditions and customs of the Kazakh people. Through the integration of linguistic and extralinguistic knowledge, the dictionary provides insights into the language, culture, and worldview of the Kazakh people at the turn of the century. From a linguistic perspective, the dictionary is notable for its rich historical vocabulary and abundance of polysemous lexical units. To reveal the semantic potential of lexical units, polysemy is examined from the perspectiveтof the semiotic system. In objective reality, however, the relationship between a sign and its linguistic meaning may vary. When the content or scope of a sign fully corresponds to its linguistic meaning, monosemy (a single meaning) arises. Conversely, discrepancies between the content of a sign and its linguistic meaning give rise to polysemy. The analysis of the lexical units presented in the dictionary confirms this theoretical understanding of the nature of polysemy. The authors identify the lexical-semantic variants (LSVs) of polysemous words and determine their common and differential sememes. The latter make it possible to establish the semantic relationships among the LSVs. The analysis of polysemous lexical units in the dictionary demonstrates the asymmetrical relationship between linguistic signs and meanings in Turkic languages. To investigate the continuity of lexical semantics throughout historical development, the article provides a comparative analysis of polysemous words found in the dictionary with their counterparts in Old Turkic and later historical periods, as well as with corresponding forms in modern Kazakh and Kyrgyz. The lexical corpus of this written monument also demonstrates the semantic richness of Turkic languages, the historical transformation of lexical meanings, and the continuity of these meanings across historical periods and in contemporary Turkic languages.