Linguocultural study of the Oirat toponymy of Russia (Republic of Kalmykia), China (Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region) and Mongolia (Khovd and Uvs aimaks): semantics and etymology of oikonyms/hydronyms
67th Annual Meeting of the PIAC, Gotemba 2025
The toponymy of the regions of the Altai community is part of the general Altai linguistic and cultural heritage. The object of our study is the Oirat toponymy (a set of names of rivers, lakes, relief, settlements, etc.) as a verbal expression of the geographical landscape of the area.
Many names recorded in past centuries have not changed. But different transliteration of the same word, population migration and a new interpretation of already known toponyms today greatly complicate their identification, identifying the etymology and meaning of geographical names. We single out two areas of Oirat geographical names: the first area includes regions where the descendants of medieval Oirats live compactly today (for example, the Republic of Kalmykia in Russia, the XUAR in China, the western Mongolia), the second is represented by Kazakhstan, Siberia, Don, etc. There is a lot of information in various kinds of literature, starting with notes of travelers visited these territories in the 18th-19th centuries, and ending with works of Russian, Mongolian, Kazakh scientists. Presenting the interpretation of field data collected during expeditions to XUAR of China in 1993, 2012, 2015. and the western aimags of Mongolia in 2007-2008, 2013-2015, the author reveals the predominance of the hydronymic system in these regions. The peculiarities of the ethnic history of the territory of the XUAR of the PRC led to the presence of toponyms of various linguistic affiliation: Chinese, Turkic, Iranian, Mongolian (Oirat). But it is also not uncommon for toponym components to have different linguistic affiliations. An example of such a hybrid toponym is the limnonym Bost-Nur (Chinese Bokhu), the first component of which is presumably of Persian origin (bostan ‘garden’), and the second is the common Mongolian geographical term nur ‘lake’. This lake is better known under the Uighur name Bagrashkel. Semantics and etymology of oikonyms (settlement names) reflect important information for the interpretation of historical facts of the past and the present.