On the attribution of putative Yukaghirisms möömö ‘bear’ and khajyһar ‘skis’ in the Yakut language

Abstract

The article addresses the problem of attributing borrowings in the context of multidirectional contacts. The object of the study is two lexemes of the Yakut language, möömö ‘bear’ and khajy һ ar ‘skis’, which are traditionally regarded as possible Yukaghirisms. The relevance of the work is determined by the fact that Yukaghir elements in the Yakut language have remained on the periphery of scholarly attention: in Yukaghir studies, research has focused mainly on borrowings into the Yukaghir language, whereas the reverse direction has not been studied in detail and systematically. The aim of the work is to establish the degree of reliability of the Yukaghir etymology for each of the two lexemes; for this purpose, the dialect material was systematized, Yakut forms were compared with Yukaghir and Tungusic-Manchu data, and the phonetic adaptation of the lexemes under consideration by means of Yakut phonology was analyzed. The material includes dialectological and explanatory dictionaries, etymological works, and StarLing databases. Comparative-historical, etymological, phonetic, areal, and dialectological methods were employed. The results showed a fundamentally different degree of reliability of attribution. For möömö , a combination of features – localization exclusively in northern dialects, a borrowing label in dialectological dictionaries, and an exact Yukaghir correspondence in the absence of independent Tungusic parallels – allows the Yukaghir etymology to be considered the most probable. For khajy һ ar , the presence of an independent Even form and the absence of direct evidence of a Yukaghir source do not permit an unambiguous decision: the lexeme is qualified as an areal contact unit with an indeterminate direction of borrowing. Thus, no single criterion of attribution is sufficient by itself; only their combination allows one to speak with varying degrees of confidence about the direction of borrowing. Prospects for further research are connected with clarifying the status of the Even q а jsа r , studying the entire system of Yakut ski designations, and expanding the material at the expense of other putative Yukaghirisms.