Lexical Materials of West Siberian Tatar in Manuscript Heritage of Russian Academics G. Z. Bayer and G. F. Müller

This article is based on the insufficiently studied scholarly legacy of the Russian academician Gottlieb Siegfried Bayer (1694–1738). It presents, for the first time, an analysis of the vocabulary found in one of the earliest monuments of the Tobol-Irtysh dialect of Siberian Tatars, specifically within a manuscript Latin-Tatar-Vogul dictionary preserved in Bayer’s archive (Glasgow, United Kingdom). The study establishes that Bayer’s dictionary was compiled based on the lexicon recorded by Russian academician Gerhard Friedrich Müller (1705–1783) in Tobolsk in 1734, which includes terms of common, basic vocabulary. The article analyzes a selection of lexical items (16 out of 99) from the Bayer-Müller dictionary with respect to their semantics, etymology, and graphic-phonetic characteristics. The research identifies indigenous Turkic lexemes as well as borrowings. Among the indigenous Turkic words are terms denoting natural phenomena (Kun ‘sun; day’, Jildű̀s ‘star’, Agatsch ‘tree; forest’, Urman ‘forest’, Kul ‘lake’), those related to society and human activities (Achtscha ‘money’, kul ‘servant’, ok ‘arrow’), the ancient common Kipchak term for deity (Tangri), and the etymologically unclear Siberian Tatar bűre`n ‘lake’. Borrowed terms are associated with Islamic religion: Chudai ‘God’, Asman ‘sky’, Atnia̋ ‘week’ (from ‘Friday’) — from Persian; Jumà ‘Friday, week’, Auwa ‘sky’, Schaitan ‘devil’ — from Arabic. A graphic-phonetic analysis of the material reveals distinctive features of vowel and consonant patterns characteristic of the Tobol-Irtysh dialect in the first half of the 18th century.

Siberia, Bayer, Müller, manuscript dictionaries, language of Siberian Tatars, semantics, etymology, graphic-phonetic features